GEEK
GIRL RISING by Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens is a very engaging look “inside
the sisterhood shaking up tech.” I am particularly excited to share the link to
many profiles and resources at GeekGirlRising.com . This book will
be a great inspiration for our students through the sharing of stories and
accomplishments of many women. A few examples include Sheila Marcelo, founder
of Care.com and Michelle Phan, creator of the e-commerce cosmetics
company Ipsy.
The
authors certainly relate the importance of women supporting other women, but
this idea could be expanded even further to highlight the unique perspective
which women often bring to project teams. We know that “Diversity Makes you Brighter” and businesses, particularly those in the tech sector,
should be motivated by their own self-interest to take steps to actively encourage
more women and minorities.
THE
END OF LOYALTY by Rick Wartzman, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, chronicles “the
rise and fall of good jobs in America,” as the subtitle notes. Wartzman bemoans
the loss of the corporate social contract by sharing the stories of four major
employers: General Motors, General
Electric, Kodak, and Coca-Cola. Since
2009, he has studied these companies in-depth and believes that “by better
understanding where we’ve been, we can be smarter about where we’re going.”
First,
Wartzman describes the benefits – like Kodak’s wage dividend, bowling alleys
and medical care – that each company provided during the twentieth century. He
references John Kenneth Galbraith’s book, The Affluent Society, and
Michael Harrington’s The Other America in an effort to contrast the
opportunities which workers at those companies experienced versus many others
in America at that time. Quoting the current
President of Gallup who argues that “The great American dream is to have a good
job and in recent years, America has failed to deliver that dream more than it
has at any time in recent memory,” Wartzman describes the impact of the shift
in focus from workers to stockholders and profits. In THE END OF LOYALTY he
touches on numerous forces such as globalization, decline of unions, more acceptance
of large layoffs, rise of knowledge and service jobs with more outsourcing for manufacturing,
and new technologies. This text has wide applicability and will certainly be of
particular interest to those who had/have an association with any of the four profiled
companies.
THE
LEAVERS by
Lisa Ko is newly published book which won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Award for Socially
Engaged Fiction due to its exploration of the US immigration system. THE
LEAVERS has been getting some positive “buzz” lately; here’s a link to The Atlantic’s review. The story of
Deming/Daniel and his mother made me think of the movie The Lion since that main
character also struggles with questions of identity and is torn between a birth
family and an adoptive one. There were elements of Girl in Translation and
Lucky Boy also, since Peilan/Polly (his birth mother) struggles to adapt to
the United States and deal with the ramifications of her illegal status. 
