The Pacific Circuit
A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Alexis Madrigal reveals how understanding Oakland explains the modern world.
In The Pacific Circuit, the award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and a vivid rendering of the defining themes of the twenty-first century.
Oakland’s stories encompass everything from Silicon Valley’s prominence and the ramifications of a compulsively digital future to the underestimated costs of technological innovation on local communities—all personified in this changing landscape by the city’s lifelong inhabitants.
The Pacific Circuit holds a magnifying glass to the legacies etched by generations of systemic segregation and the ceaseless march of technological advancement. These are not just abstract concepts; they are embedded in the very fabric of Oakland and its people, from dockworkers and community organizers to real estate developers and businesspeople chasing the highest possible profits. Madrigal delves into city hall politics, traces the intertwining arcs of venture capital and hedge funds, and offers unprecedented insight into Silicon Valley’s genesis and growth, all against the backdrop of Oakland—a city vibrating with untold stories and unexplored connections that can, when read carefully, reveal exactly how our markets and our world really function.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
