PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksMarkovits’s description of the meritocratic machine is quite believable, and it casts an intriguing light on our current inequalities ... Markovits’s book reads like a powerful brief, but one addressed to the lay reader. His writing is elegant, imaginative, and compelling. Intriguingly, his harsh depiction of both glossy and gloomy jobs jibes with the \'anti-work\' theorists who argue that, under capitalism, all forms of work entail serious self-loss ... One point that may not be sufficiently accepted, or in any case stressed, by Markovits is that work is critical to human psychology, and that at least some work is joyful and engaging ... Markovits convincingly shows, but it does not necessarily follow that we should abandon hard work in pursuit of a goal.
