A New York Times Notable Book • Daily Beast Best Nonfiction of 2014 • Inc. Magazine's Most
Thought-Provoking Books of the Year Man is born free but he is everywhere in cubicles. How did
we get from Scrooge's office to Office Space? From bookkeepers in dark countinghouses to
freelancers in bright cafes? What would the world be like without the vertical file cabinet?
What would the world be like without the office at all? In Cubed Nikil Saval chronicles the
evolution of the office in a fascinating often funny and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the
white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is. Drawing on the history of architecture
and business as well as a host of pop culture artifacts-from Mad Men to Dilbert (and yes The
Office)-and ranging in time from the earliest clerical houses to the surprisingly utopian
origins of the cubicle to the funhouse campuses of Silicon Valley Cubed is an all-encompassing
investigation into the way we work why we do it the way we do (and often don't like it) and
how we might do better.
