A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
**
"A grounded and expansive examination of the American economic divide .
. . It takes a skillful journalist to weave data and anecdotes together
so effectively." --Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times**
**
An award-winning journalist investigates Amazon's impact on the wealth
and poverty of towns and cities across the United States.**
In 1937, the famed writer and activist Upton Sinclair published a novel
bearing the subtitle A Story of Ford-America. He blasted the
callousness of a company worth "a billion dollars" that underpaid its
workers while forcing them to engage in repetitive and sometimes
dangerous assembly-line labor. Eight decades later, the market
capitalization of Amazon.com has exceeded $1.5 trillion, while the value
of the Ford Motor Company hovers around $30 billion. We have entered the
age of one-click America--and as the coronavirus makes Americans more
dependent on online shopping, Amazon's sway will only intensify.
Alec MacGillis's Fulfillment is not another exposé of our most
conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation
of the America that falls within that company's growing shadow. As
MacGillis shows, Amazon's sprawling network of delivery hubs, data
centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser
cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is
unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.
In Seattle, high-paid workers in new office towers displace a historic
Black neighborhood. In Ohio, cardboard makers supplant auto
manufacturers, and in suburban Virginia, homeowners try to protect their
town from the environmental impact of a new data center. When a
warehouse replaces a fabled steel plant on the outskirts of Baltimore, a
new model of work becomes visible. Fulfillment also shows how Amazon
has become a force in Washington, D.C., ushering readers through a
revolving door for lobbyists and government contractors and into CEO
Jeff Bezos's Kalorama mansion.
With empathy and breadth, MacGillis demonstrates the hidden human costs
of the other inequality--not the growing gap between rich and poor, but
the gap between the country's winning and losing regions. The result is
an intimate account of contemporary capitalism: its drive to innovate,
its dark, pitiless magic, its remaking of America with every click.
