A forceful and thought-provoking call to diversify the workforce with marginalized groups.
DeLong discusses the philosophy behind and practicalities of hiring workers from marginalized groups.
The author begins his text with some sobering facts about the current American workplace: The Bureau of Labor Statistics, he notes, has forecast a labor shortage in the near future—there will be about 12 million new jobs by 2030, but only nine million new entrants coming into the workforce (“You do the math,” he says). At the same time, only about 41%of the United States’ more than 11 million working-age adults with disabilities are currently in the workforce. In these pages, DeLong offers anecdotes drawn from his long experience advocating on behalf of marginalized workers and lays out practical advice for recruiting, hiring, and retaining members of three major categories of such employees: the formerly incarcerated, people with disabilities, and refugees. Tapping into this talent pool, the author stresses, takes “courage, patience, finesse, and flexibility,” and he fills these chapters with insights about the realities of the project. Writing about hiring immigrants, he cites the Congressional Budget Office’s projection that within 20 years, the immigrant workforce will be the only segment of the population still growing. “To survive and grow in the future,” DeLong writes, “most organizations must become more effective at hiring, training, and employing foreign-born workers.” The author maintains a tone of authoritative empathy throughout, the perfect register for overcoming the initial resistance he’s likely to encounter, and he insistently reminds his readers to consider the human element of the approaches he’s proposing. “It’s not about making it a huge corporate initiative,” he writes. “The thing may start with a mother, brother, cousin, or a friend who sees the challenge that a person they love can’t get a job.” Employers and potential co-workers will find DeLong’s book to be full of fascinating ideas.
A forceful and thought-provoking call to diversify the workforce with marginalized groups.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780988868625
Page Count: 326
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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