Life Inc.

April 6, 2009
Rushkoff (Nothing Sacred
) offers a shrill condemnation of how corporate culture has disconnected human beings from each other. An engaging history of commerce and corporatism devolves into an extended philippic on how increasing personal wealth and the rise of nuclear families constituted a failure of community—whose services are now provided by products and professionals. While he makes some good points—for instance, about how some laws are now written to favor the rights of corporations above the rights of human beings, and the phenomenon of pro-wealth spirituality as espoused by The Secret
, Creflo Dollar and Joel Osteen—he skews wildly off-course lamenting how “basic human activity... has been systematically robbed of its naturally occurring support mechanisms by a landscape tilted toward the market’s priorities.” His unsupported and flawed assumption that societal interdependence is a natural or even preferable state for all people, everywhere, his disdain for filthy lucre and joyless recasting of independence as “selfishness” will leave readers weary long before the end.

May 1, 2009
What do fundamentalist Christians, Margaret Thatcher, and the Rand Corporation all have in common? They are all part of a vast conspiracy that began during the Renaissance when the British East India Company began indoctrinating Europe in corporatism, the belief that corporations should be venerated. So successful were they that we now unknowingly live in a corporatist state, argues Rushkoff; the world is so slanted toward rewarding self-interested, short-term decisions that we have lost all autonomy and humanity, devolving from citizens into consumers. Rushkoff advocates for sustainable, bottoms-up activism, but many of his suggestions (including garden shares and "complimentary credit" bartering) seem like willful amnesia; history has proven that a commune by any other name remains unviable. Still, Rushkoff's prose is eminently readable, and he weaves together a colorful fabric of facts and anecdotes more than interesting enough to carry the reader past a little kookiness; the first 200 pages are truly conspiracy theorizing at its best. The last 50 pages do suffer from excessive moralizing, unsupported idealism, and a limp call to pseudoaction, but otherwise this is an entertaining screed for those who agree with Rushkoff's position.Robert Perret, Univ. of Idaho, Moscow, ID

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2009
Since the Renaissance, the corporationthe operating system of the markethas formed and controlled people, and Rushkoff describes how it has infiltrated all aspects of American life. In the twenty-first century, we continue to consider corporations as role models and saviors but engage other people as competitors to be beaten or resources to be exploited. The author bemoans extreme networking (called buzz marketing), which makes our personal, social interactions become promotional opportunities and the lines between fiction and reality and friends and market become blurred. Our lives are overextended, and there is no time, energy, or commitment to do anything but work and perhaps consider family. Rushkoff recommends that we fight back by de-corporatizing ourselves. His suggestions include thinking locally by participating directly with our neighbors in community activities and using various Internet sites that provide opportunities to contribute directly to a particular school or to extend a micro loan to a specific entrepreneur in the Third World. This is an excellent, thought-provoking book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)