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.
