PositiveThe New RepublicWhile these debates often play out chaotically on Twitter/X, animated by anguish and anger, Butler tries to meet them with reason and research ... Butler’s work has offered over and over again the basic kindness of recognizing that our painful failures to conform are what we have in common.
Alec Macgillis
PositiveThe New RepublicAlec MacGillis’s new book...captures America’s queasy relationship with its newest retail titan. What it reveals is a country that has been falling apart for quite some time, and a company that has been willing and able to turn a failure of public policy into private power ... The book is less an examination of the company than an examination of America through its lens ... Each chapter of Fulfillment is a beautifully written and sometimes overwhelmingly detailed story. You get the feeling that MacGillis is fighting to overcome the perceived gap between his likely white-collar, winners-taking-all readers, and the workers he writes about, through sheer force of detail. In this, the book has something in common with classic works that exposed the plight of the poor to those better off, like George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier or Michael Harrington’s The Other America ... What you don’t get a sense of in this book is Amazon’s structure and the range of its activities. To be fair, this isn’t the direction in which MacGillis is pointing his lens. But it’s important for understanding what might happen in Amazon’s future and ours ... What MacGillis’s book makes obvious is that Amazon will not stop squeezing every drop from workers until those workers have more power.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
MixedThe GuardianHer new book is more gossipy, it is meaner, more entertaining and more wrong-headed than anything she or her speechwriters have written before ... The tone of the book is often quippy, and Clinton seems to have adopted the public persona crafted by her fans...The quippy shtick doesn’t always work, because Clinton fails to grasp basic criticisms levelled at her from a populist perspective to a degree that can’t be winked away ... It feels tiresome to explain this, but many Americans consider bankers the enemy, and voters wanted her to pick a side...It is laughable that an American politician would be indignant about her right to accept money from banks ... Clinton’s memoir surely won’t be the end of parsing what happened in 2016. But one thing is certain: what happens next will be up to somebody else.
