RaveThe Nation... his aim is not simply to recount it or engage in the contemporary debates over the ways monopolies warp our economy and our society; instead, he wants to spark a modern movement through real, human stories. Corporate concentration and antitrust regulation can sound like dry issues. Dayen seeks to remind us of the very real consequences they have in our everyday lives ... The stories he tells can often be heartbreaking ... While the stories Dayen offers take place all across the country, from rural areas to Los Angeles’s urban sprawl, and involve people in very different communities and careers, they have the same nugget of truth at their heart: When companies are allowed to keep consolidating, people lose ... Dayen convincingly shows, monopolies are so interwoven in our economy and our lives that there is no escape from them. But his book also highlights some of the challenges faced by a politics that is primarily focused on monopoly. If you see it everywhere without pausing to clarify what is anticompetitive behavior and what is just plain old greed, you risk having the concept lose its specific meaning.
Susan Fowler
MixedThe New RepublicFowler’s own book is framed as a broad fight for equality, an act of resistance for all women, yet it’s a distinctive form of struggle—closely linked to the idea of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Fowler’s focus is resolutely individualistic; her sources of inspiration are willpower, aptitude, and a sense of personal responsibility. And though Whistleblower shows starkly how gender discrimination warps women’s careers, it also struggles to admit that this idea of meritocracy was a farce to begin with ... she fails to see that the forces that kept sending her life careening in a new direction are structural. They mean not that she wasn’t given a fair shot at meritocracy, but that we don’t live in one ... She wants Uber to \'stop breaking the law\' and to fix itself; she thinks it is \'broken, unable to do the right thing.\' But that assumes that it wasn’t operating exactly as intended in a patriarchal society that values men’s achievements over women’s humanity. It assumes that our current structures are set up to allow anyone the same chance to get ahead, if only they were applied correctly.
Josh Levin
PositiveThe New RepublicThe strength of The Queen lies in Levin’s meticulous scouring of the historical record to paint a picture of a woman who was infuriatingly difficult to pin down during her lifetime, resurrecting a biography of the person who would become the welfare queen. By examining her reality, we can finally question the very concept of a welfare queen and deconstruct a myth spun out of selective details ... Although Levin aims to locate the real Linda Taylor in this history, Taylor as a real-life human being is absent from much of Levin’s book. Until the eleventh chapter, most of what we learn about her—beyond her recorded misdeeds—is what she looked like...In the meantime, we get in-depth looks at the lives, thoughts, and motivations of the various white men surrounding her ... Levin’s book should warn against the use of false stereotypes about the poor, black people, and mothers. Linda Taylor was real and very complicated. The welfare queen never was.
