The Lenox Library is pleased to partner with The Bookstore to host an event with Alec MacGillis, author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, in conversation with William Everhart, retired Editorial Page Editor from The Berkshire Eagle, on Sunday, June 6, 2021 at 4:00 p.m. in Roche Reading Park.
Some chairs will be provided on a first come, first served basis; we encourage you to bring a folding chair or blanket.
In the event of rain, the program will shift to Zoom. Click here for the link.
In Fulfillment, award-winning journalist MacGillis investigates Amazon’s impact on the wealth and poverty of towns and cities across the United States. The book is not another inside account or 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.
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.
Alec MacGillis is a senior reporter for ProPublica and the recipient of the George Polk Award, the Robin Toner prize, and other honors. He worked previously at The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and The New Republic, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other publications. His ProPublica reporting on Dayton, Ohio was the basis of a PBS Frontline documentary about the city. He is the author of The Cynic, a 2014 biography of Mitch McConnell, and his new book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. He lives in Baltimore. Alec grew up in the Berkshires and one of his first part-time jobs in high school was shelving books at the library.