Life and Death of the American Worker, by Alice Driver (One Signal). This intimately reported chronicle focusses on the migrant workers who staff Tyson Foods chicken plants in Arkansas. Their jobs, Driver reports, come with significant physical risks: they suffer from carpal-tunnel syndrome, chemical poisoning, and U.T.I.s (thanks to limited bathroom breaks). Because many workers process more than a hundred birds per minute, accidents are common: an average of twenty-seven workers a day are hospitalized, and some undergo amputations. According to Driver, Tyson intimidates workers who speak up, and the conditions at their plants devolved further during the pandemic. (Tyson representatives denied many of the claims in the book.)
Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, by Katherine Bucknell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A masterly biography of the author of “Goodbye to Berlin” and “A Single Man,” this book captures the intricacies of a fascinating, often contradictory character. Isherwood was an upper-class Englishman (he gained American citizenship in his forties) who genuinely loved people from all walks of life; a libertine turned Vedanta monk; a gay literary icon who didn’t come out publicly until his sixties. But, above all, as Bucknell shows, he was a tireless observer and recorder of people, places, and historical moments. When Isherwood died, in 1986, he left behind a vast personal archive—material that Bucknell uses to gently tease out themes that connect the author’s life to his art. Isherwood, she writes, “imagined a world in which he might be able to live differently”; through his work, he helped usher that world into being.
Illustration by Rose Wong
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