Labor Day 2021: Need a good book on work?
06 September 2021
Hey, everyone, and welcome to the 2021 edition of my favorite holiday of the year: Labor Day! Now, avoid your family, skip church, don't go to work, and do all the other things that make this holiday so great.
As you may or may not know, I love books about work, and each Labor Day I round up all the job- and work-related nonfiction I read in the prior year. I'm off to look through the year and see what I've got...and here it is:
- Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America (About Amazon. PLEASE STOP SHOPPING AT AMAZON.)
- All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire (About the job of writing, filming, and producing "The Wire.")
- Tangled Up In Blue: Policing the American City
- Live Work Work Work Die (about NOT making it in Silicon Valley)
- The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors, and One Woman's Fight for Justice
- Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology (about a woman's work in programming in the "early days," like the 1990s)
- Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers (spoiler alert: the world of corporate managers is horrifying)
And that, friends, represents a lot of the books I wrote about here in general. Work is one of my favorite subjects to read about, perhaps because reading about work is so, SO much easier than doing work.
The books above were all really good reads; the links go to my reviews. I would particularly recommend Fulfillment, because if you need the incentive to break yourself of your Amazon habit, that might help. Amazon is killing us. It really is. And it's no good for the climate, either. Which is also killing us.
In other Labor Day news I read a stupendous book last week titled The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown. I read large chunks of it at 2 and 3 a.m. in the morning (I can't sleep anymore, thanks to perimenopause, and might I just ask why every stage of womanhood has to be horrifying?), which is a very surreal time to reading, and it was a very surreal book: fascinating and sad and crazy and thoughtful. More on that later. It deserves its own review.
So, Happy Labor Day 2021. And here, in case you want to see them, are our Labor Day lists from previous years: 2020, 2019 part 1 and part 2. 2018. 2017. 2016. 2015. 2014. 2009.