mini book reviews

Mini-reviews of The United States of Wal-Mart, Straight Man, and The Big One.

There are plenty of reasons to not support Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer:

• their overbearing cultural influence and censorship
• their false claims of bringing jobs to communities (due to closures of local businesses that cannot compete, they end up destroying nearly as many jobs as they provide),
• their treatment of employees (low paying jobs with minimal health care, history of discrimination against women, locking employees in stores overnight)
• their contribution of 1% of China's GDP (WOW!), a country that, until it cleans up its egregious human rights and environmental problems, we should not be doing business with at all
• the ripple effect of their pressure on suppliers
• and their gobbling up of huge expanses of land, only to abandon it, and the accompanying infrastructure constructed just for them, to build another store a few miles away.

Wal-Mart has also been innovative, and the size and power that make it at times so damaging also means that positive initatives can be a huge force for good (see this interesting piece on the company's recent announcement of new sustainability programs, including selling organic cotton clothing). I wanted a book which brought together information on all these issues in a comprehensive, balanced, and documented manner so I could more fully make sense of the issues surrounding the Wal-Mart controversy, and put them in a broader context.  Unfortunately, The United States of Wal-Mart was not that book.  While there were good facts, Dicker was often redundant, rarely went into depth, and his sarcastic, shrill, and sometimes profane cast serious doubts on his objectivity and therefore the credibility of the book (even when I knew some of the facts to be true).  There are other Wal-Mart books, if you can recommend a better one, please leave a note in the comments.

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Straight Man is a humorous novel about the politics of an English department in a small rural college. Academia is its own world, a strange combination of politics and bureaucracy trying to operate like an efficient corporation but run mostly by specialized intellectuals that have no business sense. As a 14-year University employee, I enjoy reading this stuff.  Russo is a talented writer, and while I know this was meant to be a farce, the situation was far beyond belief, and the main character, the English department chair, was always "on" and never serious.  It was kind of a fun read, but disappointing.  By far the best novel in this genre is Jane Smiley's Moo, which I highly recommend (especially to TroutGrrrl, if she hasn't read it).

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Finally, The Big One was about the 1811/1812 New Madrid earthquakes in the Midwest.  I found it pretty dry and boring, unlike other historical books on natural disasters, such as Erik Larson's riveting Isaac's Storm about the 1900 Galveston hurricane. In fact, I didn't even finish The Big One.  I'd still be interested in reading about these quakes, and have had When the Mississippi Ran Backwards recommended to me.  Let me know if you've read it and what you think.

Comments

[TroutGrrrl]

Hey, thanks for the reading suggestions. I'm finished with the 2 I've been working on for months, so it's great timing for me!