THE AWL, Korean Manha of labor trouble like we're having

THE AWL Vol. 1
CHOI GYU-SEOK (tr. Lynn Eskow)
Ablaze Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Awl is a story of ordinary folks struggling to be treated as humans.

Set in the latter half of the 2000s, against the backdrop of “Pureumi”, a fictional superstore chain in South Korea, the work unfolds with a focus on two protagonists: Yi Su-in, who has been instructed by the corporation to dismiss workers unjustly; and Gu Go-sin, a labor activist.

A man of principles, Su-in is someone who cannot restrain outspoken criticism and is constantly at odds with the world. Though he has quit a career in the armed forces to live quietly and chosen an ordinary job, he once again clashes against the world because the company has ordered him to drive out employees by force.

Aiding Su-in is Go-sin, a cool-headed and deft labor activist who runs a labor counseling center near the Pureumi chain. Unlike Su-in, who has difficulty getting along with people and sternly sticks to rules, he approaches others without hesitation and even resorts to extreme measures at times to accomplish goals.

Together, Su-in and Go-sin will oppose the manipulation and moral harassment to which the employees are cynically subjected. The process through which these two figures remind ordinary, diligent workers of their rights and bring change together will fire up readers.

Remarkable in mastery and brilliance, author Choi Gyu-seok (The Hellbound) depicts with finesse all the adventures of this shock of two worlds, and at the same time offers an amazing portrait of a complex Korean society, crossed by multiple tensions.

Proof that popular works can also be created based on social topics, The Awl has left an indelible mark on South Korean comics. Entertaining and moving at the same time, The Awl remains a monumental work in the nation’s comics, consummate in its artistry, while conveying an important social message.

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My Review: I'm the target audience for this story. I had a hard time following it because my sequential-art skills are pretty poor. I'm working to get myself past that barrier, but this story challenged my determination hard. I can't get to a full four stars because if I, fully on the side of these union guys, can't keep focused, what's the less-convinced reader going to do?

It seems odd to provide the US-market reviewers with Korean language artwork.

Nonetheless, I found the story of a man in corporate slavery, I mean work, with a functional conscience and a powerful moral compass, refreshing; I appreciated the PoV of the street-tough union organizer being humanized, as well.

It's not for everyone, but the ones it's for should know it exists.

I DELIVER PARCELS IN BEIJING: One Man's Quest to Speak the Truth about the Global Gig Economy, deeply saddening, all too common story

I DELIVER PARCELS IN BEIJING: One Man's Quest to Speak the Truth about the Global Gig Economy
HU ANYAN (tr. Jack Hargreaves)
Astra House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending February 15, 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In 2023, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing became the literary sensation of the year in China. Hu Anyan’s story, about short-term jobs in various anonymous megacities, hit a nerve with a generation of young people who feel at odds with an ever-growing pressure to perform and succeed.

Hu started posting essays about his experiences online during COVID lockdowns. His recollection of night shifts in a huge logistics center in the south of China went viral: his nights were so hot that he could drink three liters of water without taking a toilet break; his days were spent searching for affordable rooms with proper air-conditioning; and his few moments of leisure were consumed by calculations of the amount of alcohol needed to sleep but not feel drowsy a few hours later.

Hu Anyan tells us about brutal work, where there is no real future in sight. But Hu is armed with deadpan humor and a strong idea of self. He moves on when he feels stuck—from logistics in the south, to parcel delivery in Beijing, to other impossible jobs. Along the way, he turns to reading and writing for strength and companionship.

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is an honest and startling first-person portrait of Hu Anyan's struggle against the dehumanizing nature of our contemporary global work system—and his discovery of the power of sharing a story.

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My Review: I see why this was a literary sensation in China. It's a real telling-truth-to-power story of how labor exploitation functions; it's an honest appraisal of the personal costs of the gig economy in a country where that is fresh ground to be broken.

It isn't so new a topic here. We have many books about the gig economy and the evils of end-stage capitalism taking over our lives. But Author Hu is a man possessed of a self-deprecating streak, as well as personal humility, coupled with self-awareness. It makes his take on economic exploitation broadly relevant as well as personally centered. He is a worker, a man who feels the need to do the job he has taken to the best of his ability. Not for him the do-the-minimum slacking life! That has the downside of making him susceptible to manipulation by unscrupulous bosses whose desire to extract ever more labor from him he has trouble coming to terms with.

It's a struggle he becomes aware of as he realizes what this character trait he is lauded and exploited for is causing him real harm.

promotional art from the publisher

It's a sad truth that hustle culture is a sharp knife in the ribs of any kind of satisfying social life. Author Hu learns this early...and sadly often. It is mildly frustrating to follow the man as he grows into realizing he has only acquaintances instead of friends yet not see him really take steps to deepen his non-work connections with others. I can see the issue, of course; he's leading the same life as the people he meets.

Author Hu does say, as the end of the book approaches, that he is no longer the pushover he was. I wonder...I saw no sign of it because he told me this as a fact, in a kind of summing-up of his working (and only) life, and ended the story. He's quite young. It makes a kind of sense. It does make one want to yell, "AnYan! stop telling, start showing," until realization hits: He can't, there hasn't been time yet. It's a story in progress. I think it made the read more urgent for me after I really internalized that fact.

A book you might be tempted to read down, to think of as an incomplete memoir, that is really a call to Author Hu's age cohort to recognize and correct course on their own iterations of his behaviors. A very honest look at a very dark side of global labor exploitation that does so much to enable our spoiled, luxurious lifestyles.

Worth your time and treasure to get for your TBR.

WINNING THE EARTHQUAKE How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress, recovering the life of a great American

WINNING THE EARTHQUAKE How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress
LORISSA RINEHART
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The first major biography of Jeannette Rankin, a groundbreaking suffragist, activist, and the first American woman to hold federal office.

“Few members of Congress have ever stood more alone while being true to a higher honor and loyalty.” —President John F. Kennedy on Jeannette Rankin

Born on a Montana ranch in 1880, Jeannette Rankin knew how to drive a tractor, ride a horse, make a fire, and read the sky for weather. But most of all, she knew how to talk to people, how to convince them of her vision for America. It was this rare skill that led her, in 1916, to become the first woman ever elected to the House of Representatives.

As her first act, Rankin introduced the legislation that would become the 19th Amendment. Throughout her two terms in 1916 and 1940, she continued to introduce and pass legislation benefitting unions, protecting workers, and increasing aid for children in poverty. In 1941, she stood tall as the sole anti-war voice in Congress during WWII, advocating for pacifism in the face of tragedy and stating that you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

A suffragist, feminist, peace activist, workers' rights advocate, progressive, and Republican, Rankin remained ever true to her beliefs—no matter the price she had to pay personally. Yet, despite the momentous steps she made for women in politics, overcoming the boys club of capitalists and career politicians who never wanted to see a woman in Congress, Jeannette Rankin’s story has been largely forgotten. In Winning the Earthquake, Lorissa Rinehart deftly uncovers the compelling history behind this singular American hero, bringing her story back to life

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My Review: I was aware of Rankin as the lone voice against declaring war in 1941. My 1970s public school education in Austin taught me that fact in seventh grade; nothing positive was ever added to it in any class I ever took on History, on sociology, or any other discipline at any later stage of my education. This book, published fifty years after that initial mention of Rankin's name, is the first comprehensive biography of a very very important voice in US politics in the first half of the twentieth century. This proves a point Author Rinehart makes:

"Nowhere in her education or prolific reading had she learned that in 1848, three hundred women gathered in Seneca Falls to declare their sovereign right to the ballot. Nor had she heard that since then, women in every state of the nation had been fighting for their right to vote. To her even greater amazement, they had won it in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, all before the turn of the twentieth century. She and all American women seemed to have been purposefully denied knowledge of their own struggle for liberation."

My one cavil with this statement is the modifying presence of "seemed" since there is no better way to stop people from making change than to stop them from knowing about the changes that have already happened. If authoritarians do not want any changes either made again or expanded on, they simply erase the history that shows their way is not the only way from public discourse. Then the few places the awareness of the changes survives can be marginalized and shouted down.

Book banning is step one; book burning step two; reducing literacy overall is the final nail in the coffin the high-control society uses.

I was drawn in by the title of the book. It seemed so off-kilter, so self-evidently contradictory, that I wanted to know where it came from hence my desire to read a book about someone I knew nothing substantive about. It's from one of pacifist Rankin's well-known in her time sayings: "you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." Millennia of corroborative evidence has had no appreciable effect on war's prevalence.

I was impressed by the depth of Author Rinehart's scholarship. Her extensive notes and citations were all very enlightening and well-chosen from my layman's point of view. There are widely varying sources cited so this tells me how very much work it was to find all the factual crumbs she did. One major shock, though honestly it shouldn't've been, was that the representative from Montana was elected as a Republican. I'm so steeped in the post-LBJ empire of evil that is the modern GOP that I've lost sight of the entire progressive history of the Republicans. Go read about Robert La Follette and Teddy Roosevelt. Time was these were the progressive leaders, not the soulless evil bastards in the McConnell/Bush/Cheney ilk or the wild-eyed reactionary MAGAts.

How likely is the present base, let alone "leadership", of the party to embrace a pacifist follower of Gandhi, a campaigner for the abolition of the Electoral College, and vehement supporter of unions? Growing up in Montana in the 1880s (when their representatives were called "the gentlemen from Anaconda," the state's largest employer and main economic driver), Rankin recognized the evils of untrammeled capitalism. She emulated Jane Addams in her work for the betterment of ordinary folks. Rankin was, in short, the best kind of radical there is, a radical believer in people and their power to do good...when left to do it.

A role model for today who is finally getting her scholarly due, I hope the sudden awareness of Gen Z that things in the US do not have to be this way will lead some of them to discover this spirit-parent from our country's past.

A SILENT FURY: The El Bordo Mine Fire, in case you wondered why Mexicans do not love the US

A SILENT FURY: The El Bordo Mine Fire
YURI HERRERA (tr. Lisa Dillman)
And Other Stories (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company―the largest employer in the region, and known simply as the Company―may have been guilty of murder.

The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a short evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that “no more than ten” men remained in the shafts at the time of their closure, and Company doctors hastened to proclaim them dead. The El Bordo stayed shut for six days.

When the mine was opened there was a sea of charred bodies―men who had made it as far as the exit, only to find it shut. The final death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. And there were seven survivors.

Now, a century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has carefully reconstructed a worker’s tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his hometown. His sensitive and deeply humanizing work is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.

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My Review: Short, sharp bark of outrage at a century's remove. Corporate personhood was taking shape as this nightmarish dereliction of responsibility and duty of care took place; no punishment, no justice, not even the cold, uncaring offer of cash recompense was ever levied. Certainly none was offered.

Yuri Herrera's emotional recounting of these events is short, never easy to read, and quite possibly better in theory than practice. I agree with his points, and yet was feeling hectored by the read. Might better've been a novel, with the incandescent outrage presented from multiple PoVs.

As it is, this is an anticapitalist screed for those of us already on the pews.

THE CANCER FACTORY: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers

THE CANCER FACTORY: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers
JIM MORRIS
Beacon Press
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The story of a group of Goodyear Tire and Rubber workers fatally exposed to toxic chemicals, the lawyer who sought justice on their behalf, and the shameful lack of protection our society affords all workers

Working at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, was considered a good job. It was the kind of industrial manufacturing job that allowed blue-collar workers to thrive in the latter half of the 20th century—that allowed them to buy their own home, and maybe a boat for the lake.

But it was also the kind of job that gave you bladder cancer.

The Cancer Factory tells the story of the workers who experienced one of the nation's worst, and best-documented, outbreaks of work-related cancer, and the lawyer who has represented the bladder-cancer victims at the plant for more than thirty years, as well as the retired workers who have been diagnosed with the disease and live in constant fear of its recurrence.

In doing so it tells a story of corporate malfeasance and governmental neglect. Workers have only weak protections from exposure to toxic substances in America, and regulatory breaches contribute to an estimated 95,000 deaths from occupational illness each year. Goodyear, and its chemical supplier, Dupont, knew that two of the chemicals used in the plant had been shown to cause cancer, but made little effort to protect the plant's workers until the cluster of bladder cancer cases—and deaths—was undeniable. Based on four decades of reporting and delving deeply into the scientific literature about toxic substances and health risks, the arcana of worker regulations, and reality of loose enforcement, The Cancer Factory exposes the sometimes deadly risks too many workers face.

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My Review: The problems of a corporatized economy are multitudinous. One of the biggest is the existence of actual, unkillable zombies: the artificial persons we call corporations. The existence of corporations is not, by itself, evil or even provocative of evil. What happens, though, when one endows a legal fiction with personhood without accountability or mortality is that it never develops morality or empathy.

No entity that could look at the actual people whose lives were ruined, or ended, by the awfulness that is bladder cancer, know that the actions to prevent others from suffering like fates were within its power to enact, and not do it because it might hurt profits, has any business whatsover being given "rights" to free speech or anything else. But that is what the legal fiction of corporate personhood does. The managers and legal eagles who fought the enactment of even the most minimal safety regulations are actual people and can be held accountable. The corporation is the source of the culture that encouraged these people not to see the suffering of actual human beings as a reality to be valued as highly as they saw more money...money they would share in minimally, if at all. They, in their fiduciary duty to the corporation, did not see human life as more worthy of protection and duty of care than corporate profits, and as these corporations are not real people but only fictions, this is utterly outside any system of moral accountability.

Fines, sanctions, no kind of economic penalty can train a corporation not to see its eternal quest for MORE as evil and as detrimental to the world as it is, because it is a gestalt, a culture, not a human being. The human beings who make up the corporations' staff and management can all, plausibly, point to the fact they are just following orders.

So was Adolf Eichmann.

This book, using decades of reporting, writing, and reasearch of the author's own and also from many sources, makes the case for abolishing corporate personhood indirectly and compellingly by bringing to life the consequences of profits before people in a dangerous, necessary business through personal stories of its victims. There are no innocents here...people needed jobs and ignored the evident consequences to get the paychecks. The problem isn't one way only. The problem is the widely pervasive mindset that enables such oblivious, unchecked greed to flourish.

But what about the law, the regulations that exist to protect the people who handle dangerous chemicals? Yes, indeed...what about them. First, does the substance meet the standards to have a regulation in place to restrict who can handle it and how they can do it? The steps needed to prove that exact regulation is needed must take place in specific ways and have specific thresholds of evidence met for regulations to be drafted at all...that involves both the maker and the user of the substance, who have entire law firms lying, obfuscating, paying off whoever needs paying off to prevent the regulations from taking place for as long as it can be avoided while more profits are stockpiled. Then there are the regulators...subject to bought-and-paid-for politicians' oversight, aka interference, delaying and derailing as much as possible while more profits are stockpiled. More lives lost, more havoc rained on the workers, who don't leave their jobs desite the evident hazards because they need the paychecks, even though evidence mounts that the jobs are killing them...literally. All while more profits are stockpiled.

So a regulation finally, grudgingly, attenuatedly takes effect. Who enforces it? The corporation, and this obvious conflict of interest is lightly supervised by a staff of very very overstretched regulatory enforcers usually drawn from the regulated industry...as often as not from the violator corporation. All of whom answer to the corrupted-by-corporate-money politicians and their appointees.

Does the magnitude of the problem begin to dawn on you?

This book does what I can't do in a review. It marshals sources and resources for you to look at the facts and make your own judgments about the nature of the corporate entities, as they present themselves in relation to workers they can no longer deny harming. It's been established in courts of several levels of jurisdiction. The journalists, activists, and the lawyers who worked with the victims to get them justice and compensation for the abusive practices used by their employers are much to be lauded. They are not, however, teaching a human being by imposing consequences on them. They are inconveniencing entities that are without minds or consciences in their profit-taking, and in their one effectively attackable weak spot: public reputation.

Bad reputation is the one way to punish the entities who remorselessly, repeatedly, and knowingly enact all the harms detailed in this book. They have used giant, costly media campaigns...that you pay for with higher prices...to distract and misinform you as they move the plants that cause this havoc to powerless minority communities, or countries that have even less regard than the US for their peoples' health.

If there is a solution to this problem, I do not know of it.