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bobbypillote 's review for:
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis, Stefan Alexander MacGillis
What an unmitigated mess of a book. It’s a shame that MacGillis is actually a skilled and engaging author, because he’s written a volume that’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.
There are MANY issues here, but the main one is that MacGillis refuses to make an argument. Is Amazon bad? He won’t tell you! Instead we get anecdote after anecdote of “here’s something bad that happened, and Amazon was kinda-sorta-maybe involved.” One such story is about a tornado that hit an Amazon warehouse, killing two employees. Tragic? Absolutely. Amazon’s fault? No. Jeff Bezos doesn’t control the weather (yet). This book is for people who have already made up their mind that Amazon is bad — very bad — and want to masturbate alongside MacGillis for 340 pages.
Setting ALL that aside, this book also unfortunately reflects MacGillis’ horribly misguided worldview. He yearns for the industrial-manufacturing economy of yore because… I’m not sure, exactly. He has a fetish for small towns, or something. Never mind that America is far more prosperous and a far better place to live than it was 50 or 100 years ago. He also continually undercuts his argument about a “winner-take-all” economy by featuring the *many* winners. If things were really winner-take-all, why would Columbus, OH be doing well? If it’s not because they built a bunch of little factories, MacGillis doesn’t care. And he avoids ANY discussion of the benefits of urbanization and agglomeration, of which there are many!
Finally, I’ll point out that MacGillis is VERY loose with the facts (an interesting trait for a senior ProPublica reporter… hmm…). I can’t say that anything is outright wrong, but he is deliberately misleading with much of the information presented in the book, mostly in the service of disparaging urban-dwellers.
In conclusion: don’t read this book. Do some online shopping (on Amazon!) instead.
There are MANY issues here, but the main one is that MacGillis refuses to make an argument. Is Amazon bad? He won’t tell you! Instead we get anecdote after anecdote of “here’s something bad that happened, and Amazon was kinda-sorta-maybe involved.” One such story is about a tornado that hit an Amazon warehouse, killing two employees. Tragic? Absolutely. Amazon’s fault? No. Jeff Bezos doesn’t control the weather (yet). This book is for people who have already made up their mind that Amazon is bad — very bad — and want to masturbate alongside MacGillis for 340 pages.
Setting ALL that aside, this book also unfortunately reflects MacGillis’ horribly misguided worldview. He yearns for the industrial-manufacturing economy of yore because… I’m not sure, exactly. He has a fetish for small towns, or something. Never mind that America is far more prosperous and a far better place to live than it was 50 or 100 years ago. He also continually undercuts his argument about a “winner-take-all” economy by featuring the *many* winners. If things were really winner-take-all, why would Columbus, OH be doing well? If it’s not because they built a bunch of little factories, MacGillis doesn’t care. And he avoids ANY discussion of the benefits of urbanization and agglomeration, of which there are many!
Finally, I’ll point out that MacGillis is VERY loose with the facts (an interesting trait for a senior ProPublica reporter… hmm…). I can’t say that anything is outright wrong, but he is deliberately misleading with much of the information presented in the book, mostly in the service of disparaging urban-dwellers.
In conclusion: don’t read this book. Do some online shopping (on Amazon!) instead.