Critique JUNE 2019 : ISSUE 97
Books “W
ebsites don’t materialise out of thin air or sustain themselves without work – it’s proofreaders, web designers, and ‘content watchdogs’ who keep the internet relatively functional and accessible,” said The Strangers in a pre-event intro to the authors of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. “Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri assert that, despite the necessary services they provide, companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other tech behemoths undervalue this ‘invisible human labour force’ by grossly underpaying them and denying them health benefits.” Kirkus Reviews explains that the pair, “Draw on a pioneering five-year study of workers in the United States and India. The authors provide a revealing, overly detailed view of this rapidly growing world of ‘ghost work,’ in which ‘faceless’ labour platforms (at the behest of well-known firms) hire workers represented by numbers rather than names.” Ghost Work “portrays a world in which invisible armies of online workers are hired, tasked, managed, paid, and often fired by machines. This setting would make for gripping dystopian science fiction – were Gray and Suri not describing the present,” gasps David Autor, Ford Professor of Economics at MIT. “Their book convinces me that greater transparency and regulatory oversight will be crucial for ensuring that the future of work ‘works’ well for platform workers, not just for the platforms that oversee them.” “When Violet Moller was a young historian in England, she wondered ‘what had happened to the books on mathematics, astronomy and medicine from the ancient world. How did they survive? Who recopied and translated them?’” write Kirkus Reviews of The Map of Knowledge. “To provide some answers, the author meticulously and enthusiastically unwinds the ‘dense, tangled undergrowth
of manuscript history’ in seven cities... It’s a dramatic story of how civilisation was passed on and preserved.” Tim Liang-Smith recalls Moller’s summary in his Telegraph critique. “‘There were the Greeks, and then the Romans, and then there was the Renaissance.’ In the interim between the last two, Europe had merely misplaced its intellectual heritage, before finding it in the attic, where it had been all along. The true story, carefully illustrated by Moller in this fascinating book, is both far more complicated and far more interesting.” Euclid’s Elements “Is the seed from which my subject of mathematics grew,” says Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. “Thanks to Moller’s fascinating and meticulous account I’ve had a glimpse of just how this text, together with works by Ptolemy and Galen, blossomed as they wound their way through the centuries and the seven cities at the heart of her book. What an adventure.” Every Human Loves by Joanna Pearson is a collection of 14 stories “That focuses on how tensions build to the breaking point for isolated people who have reached their limits”, say Kirkus Reviews. “Her voice nimbly creates a sense of strangeness and detachment without ever lapsing into coldness.” Synapsis enthuses, “[It is] breathlessly stunning, in the sense that it is beautiful writing, but also in that it is profoundly unsettling. The 14 stories in collection demand rests between one and the next in order to absorb the various uncanny landscapes: raw urban cities, the alleys of clinics and hospitals, Gothic southern farms and highways, ‘the woods’ (and the things hiding in them), and delirious ‘post-partum fever dreamghost stories.’” The works are “Imaginative and haunting,” say Foreword Reviews. “It is a masterful collection, written with insight and empathy... there’s a strength, a lucidity, and a brilliance that shimmers and enchants.” 17