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Recent Releases BOOKS FOR A BUSY WORLD
and perhaps enabled far-right nationalist parties in the Western World. A People’s History of Silicon Valley follows the history of the people exploited, displaced, and made obsolete by the tech industry, from the colonization of the Bay Area to the present day. From the first Macintosh to the rise of social media, A People’s History of Silicon Valley peels back the curtain on an industry that brands itself as visionary yet which may be chipping away at the fundaments of society, including our democratic institutions.
PAPERBACK Computing & internet/ politiCs/HaCktivism www.eyewearpublisHing.Com
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HEAVY: An American Memoir Kiese Laymon ’98 SCRIBNER
Laymon’s memoir is addressed to his mother, a woman whose desperate efforts to keep her son from danger made their own home dangerous with her sometimes brutal discipline. Laymon’s quest for excellence is apparent in his work, but the cost makes the equation complicated. “Laymon’s writing, as rich and elegant as mahogany, offers us comfort even as we grapple with his book’s unflinching honesty,” writes Saeed Jones in the New York Times.
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keitH a. spenCer
Keith A. Spencer is a San Francisco-based writer, artist and commentator. He is currently an editor at Salon.com, where he manages science and tech coverage, and previously served as editor-in-chief of the Bay Area culture magazine The Bold Italic.
A PeoPle’s History of silicon VAlley
Look More Closely
Regardless of where you live or work, Silicon Valley undoubtedly touches your life; indeed, the tech industry’s ubiquitous gadgets promise us more efficiency, convenience and fun. Yet despite Silicon Valley’s utopian promise, more and more of us find ourselves addicted to our smartphones, made insecure by social media, and alarmed at how tech companies profit off our personal data. And while Silicon Valley’s CEOs are often viewed as visionary prophets, their companies’ policies have sown social discord around the world, led to mass evictions in the Bay Area,
BOOKS
a people’s History of
SiLicOn VALLeY How tHe teCH industry exploits workers, erodes privaCy and undermines demoCraCy
Keith A. SpenCer
A People’s History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy Keith A. Spencer ’09 SQUINT BOOKS
Many of us who use our smartphones to book our Uber to take us to our Airbnb might think—if we think anything of it—that it’s all kind of cool. San Franciscobased writer Keith A. Spencer is here to kill our buzz. While hip upstarts forming Silicon Valley startups tout their benefits—to employees and, sometimes, to all of humanity in general, Spencer shows us that the one thing they’re not disrupting is traditional capitalism. Taking as his inspiration Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Spencer explores how tech companies exploit cheap global labor as well as the private lives of its customers.
The Accidental Bad Girl Maxine Kaplan ’07
The Shakespeare Requirement Julie Schumacher ’81
AMULET
DOUBLEDAY
Kendall Evans begins her final year at her private New York high school with every insecure teen’s biggest fear: to be caught with her best friend’s ex and blackmailed into dealing drugs as a result. Okay, maybe not every teen. But Kendall’s slide into a life of crime seems entirely plausible as told by Kaplan, who seems to understand the complex language of her characters—the gestures, glances, heavy sighs, and the single word that cuts sharp and deep. The sexual double standards and the predatory practices of some of the boys exposed in the book make The Accidental Bad Girl particularly relevant now.
The Shakespeare Requirement takes place on the campus of Payne University, where the gloomy English department literally labors beneath gleaming econ in its renovated second-floor faculty offices. While econ is skylight-lit and abuzz with buzzwords, English has a colony of wasps strafing hapless faculty members in nearly Dickensian digs. The university dean sends out a memo titled “The Road to Ecexellence,” and helpful student leaders greet new students wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the orientation slogan “Get Ready for Payne.” Such pleasures abound in this new novel, a sequel to Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, which earned this University of Minnesota faculty member the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? Robert Kuttner ’65 NORTON
Americans sometimes confuse capitalism for democracy, and vice versa, but Kuttner argues that global capitalism, through policies that leave workers unprotected, bankers unregulated, corporation untaxed, and national economic security undermined, has put democracy in jeopardy. Kuttner, cofounder and coeditor of The American Prospect and the Ida and Meyer Kirstein Chair at Brandeis University, offers a counter to runaway, predatory capitalism. “If democracy is to survive,” he writes, “the cycle will need to be reversed. This will require much stronger democratic institutions and a radical transformation of capitalism into a far more social economy.”