The Pacific circuit A globalized account of the battle for the soul of an American city

NPR host Madrigal (Powering the Dream) offers a sprawling history of Oakland, Calif., that situates the bustling port city at the heart of a new, technology-dominated world economic order. Oakland and its port are integral, he writes, to the "pacific circuit" of global capitalism with its "trade routes and trade deals, human migrations and technical exchanges... cargo ships and corporate relations." Tracing the city's history since WWII, he depicts how the welfare of its mostly Black, working-class residents has been slowly "sacrificed" to the "economic growth" of this international trade circuit--a story he teases out from documentation of real estate deals, reports on city hall politics, and interviews with activists. He also offers fascinating insight into Silicon Valley's rise by framing it as part of a major turn in world history: "what the Mediterranean was for millennia and the Atlantic was for centuries, the Pacific is now," he writes, exploring how the "marriage of American capital and corporate know-how with Asian labor and technical capacity" has birthed the world's foremost economic engine. Madrigal's fine-grained analysis engrosses, especially as he follows local politicians struggling to "tap" the vast amounts of capital flowing through Oakland, or environmental activists trying to untangle the complex routes by which pollution ends up in their community. The result is an eye-opening window into the opaque and circuitous "market logic" that dominates modern life. (Mar.)

Lessons to be learned from the history of Oakland, California. In this expansive book, Madrigal explores Oakland's ecosystem--from its storied past as home to longshoremen, Black Panthers, and the blues to its prospects as the epicenter of what he calls the Pacific Circuit--a "vast, powerful, opaque cultural structure" that controls the flow of consumer goods. Throughout the San Francisco Bay Area city, Madrigal says, he sees "the marriage of American capital and corporate know-how with Asian labor and technical capacity." The book traces the rise of containerization, born of wartime need, how it links U.S. manufacturers to cheap Asian labor, and the ways it's controlled by Silicon Valley. A journalist and author ofPowering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, Madrigal argues that it is in Oakland's port where one can best view these economic, environmental, and cultural effects. The external costs to people and the environment, which result from the instant gratification of one-click consumption, are laid bare. One of the Pacific Circuit's features is to siphon money from around the world and concentrate it locally. Billionaires and elite tech workers benefit. This, says Madrigal, is "the simple answer for why the Bay Area got so expensive." Unfortunately, as he notes, "the deepest, most haunting forms of American racism work through property." Here, he explores racial capitalism and how it has affected Black families living in the port's shadow; the book is framed by his admiring portrait of Margaret Gordon, a community activist and former Oakland port commissioner whose "crowning achievement," he writes, is the Maritime Air Quality Improvement Plan of 2009. Madrigal's writing can be poetic, even when he's examining sediment: "The mining waste fell where it would somewhere on the floor of the bay. Great dredging machines chomped and slurped up this material, and builders mixed it with whatever else was around, and it becamefill. Compact it hard enough and it becameland, new land, histories mixed and buried." An incisive look at the invisible forces of consumption shaping not just a single city, but our world. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.