PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books... if an employer uses the language of love to stifle its employees’ fight for labor justice, then does that employer genuinely love its employees? Sarah Jaffe’s new book...has an answer to this question and it’s a sobering one that all workers need to hear ... One of the major strengths of Work Won’t Love You Back is its commitment to tracing the relevant labor history of the professions it scrutinizes ... Workers in all sectors, including care work, retail, health care, and tech, must continue to come together, build solidarity, and fight against neoliberal exploitation. This is the implicit call to arms in Jaffe’s book.
Laila Lalami
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksI read Conditional Citizens as a first-generation immigrant, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who has been teased for being \'a commie\' and \'a Russian spy\' but also complimented on successful assimilation by those who knew nothing of the process. I read Conditional Citizens while holed up in my apartment, immunocompromised and afraid of catching or spreading the novel coronavirus.I read Conditional Citizens as a break from scrolling through social media feeds and learning about ordinary individuals who couldn’t get tested until it was too late, while celebrities got diagnosed and treated. I saw the president lean hard into racism and xenophobia, repeatedly saying \'Chinese virus,\' and thus tacitly encouraging harassment and violence against Asian Americans ... This is why books like Conditional Citizens are important. They remind us that the dichotomy of citizen and non-citizen is too facile. Even legal citizenship does not guarantee cultural citizenship, equality under the law, or safety from state brutality ... Lalami does not offer her readers the option of hopelessness and disengagement. On the contrary, her words compel us to keep returning to the question of who belongs in the United States, and under what conditions, and to remember that the stakes of this question are about not merely feelings, or even \'entitlements,\' but survival itself ... Conditional Citizens is a tightly crafted and highly accessible book. Those who carry around the US Constitution should consider adding this book to their collection, if only to remind them of how the Constitution fails, by design, to protect those who live among them but experience citizenship as restricted, situational, or entirely out of reach.
Jia Tolentino
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksA theme that unites all of the essays is that of \'the self as an endlessly monetizable asset\' online and off. One of the most interesting essays in the collection is \'Always Be Optimizing,\' which suggests that, for today’s cis woman, being a \'well-performing avatar\' is expected but not enough ... Tolentino reminds us that the opaque and seemingly endless data gathering techniques on the part of tech companies have worn down users’ sense of boundaries surrounding privacy ... \'The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams\' is another insightful essay about both the perils of life under late capitalism as well as opportunities for those willing to exploit workers, students, and even patients ... An important through-line in the book—one well known to organizers—is that we cannot solve structural problems with individualistic solutions or resources that only affect small groups of socioeconomically privileged women.
Tressie McMillan Cottom
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books\"Despite these high stakes, Thick is more thematically broad and stylistically free than Lower Ed, which should appeal to readers who like intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture. The playful, familiar tone of the eight essays reminds readers why the author has captured the attention of [several outlets], and her many social media followers. The essays in Thick are economical in their use of words. They can deliver a swift punch in the gut but also be pithy, tongue-in-cheek, and fun ... McMillan Cottom transforms... narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women like her mother and herself ... Thick’s essays challenge readers to go further, beyond \'race 101.\'\
Rebecca Traister
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books\"Traister’s treatment of the election is less a detailed autopsy than a focused study of the percolation of women’s indignation, a building toward revolt. Not all the anger was between women and powerful men ... As Traister demonstrates, unresolved racial, ethnic, and class tensions transferred to the first women’s march, the largest single-day protest in American history ... readers see Traister genuinely wrestle with the idea that anger is a revolutionary force because it is destructive ... Good and Mad gives numerous historical examples of missed opportunities to either form or maintain bonds between white women and racial minorities in America ... As the title of Traister’s book suggests, being good or being mad is a false dilemma. If we want to usher in a post-Trump era, we have to be both.\
