National Nurses United

one form or another and creates space to come to terms with a topic that's typically considered taboo to discuss in society. By facing death, Bowe tries to teach her students how to live and find happi- ness in life. "Most of you are here for a reason," says Bowe to her class at the beginning of one semester. "We're sitting in a circle right now because we're really beginning a bereavement group." Hayasaki counts herself among that group. At the start of the book, Hayasaki relates how one of her best high school friends was murdered while they were still teenagers, and how her friend's death was the very first one she ever wrote about. As a newspaper reporter, she would go on to report about the Virginia Tech shootings and many other disasters. To write this book, Hayasaki completes Bowe's Death Class and follows the professor and some of her most memorable students around for four years. There's Caitlin, whose mother repeatedly tries to commit suicide, and her boyfriend Jonathan, whose younger brother suffers from schizophrenia and eventually kills himself. There's Israel, a former gang member who decides to leave that life after almost executing a rival gang leader. There's Carl, serving a 40- something-year prison sentence for beating a man to death. And there's Norma herself, a survivor of abuse and domestic violence at the hands of her own parents. Hayasaki deftly weaves all of their sto- ries together and shows how, through Bowe and her teachings about death, they begin to forge new paths for themselves that are not based upon fear, but hope. As people who see patients' lives hang in the balance each day, we think nurses will enjoy this thought-provoking and ultimately inspiring book. —Lucia Hwang Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans By Simon Head Basic Books, 2014 Mindless is a provocative book that demystifies the pseudo-scientific management-speak used to control practices and processes in a human services environment. It's a fascinating study of the role of information technology and automated systems as a driver of socioeconomic inequality. Author Simon Head's humanist perspec- tive on the dominance of the big data culture and the roboticization of human work is one that nurses will quickly relate to. This new release further expands on Head's 2003 volume, The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age. It remains a stunning chronicle of how information technology has fueled the colonization of industrial-manufacturing engineering processes into all sectors of the human services economy, from public education to healthcare, leading to standardization and conformity. From the first chapter, Head plunges inside "the belly of the beast" and performs a scholarly and accessible dissection of the powerful agents of the new industrial state, known as Computer Business Systems (CBS). The non-expert reader will be intrigued and ultimately shocked by how the interrelated elements of CBS (computer networks linked to work stations, data warehouses, and expert systems designed to mimic human intelligence) enable managerial hegemony and corporate governance. Head skillfully exposes a largely hidden world of the ideas and practices of corporations, consultants, and management theorists who sustain these CBSs. He describes how the inequalities of skill, power, and income separate those who create and control these systems (the managerial and technocratic elite) from those who are subject to the system's orders and have to follow them. As management becomes preoccupied with monitoring, tracking, measurement, and control, they begin implementing "best practice" algorithms that supplant judgment and workers soon lose their ability to be creative and use their discretion. Although the stated goal is to eliminate variation, once profes- sional practices and processes are sufficiently broken down, frag- mented, and routinized, they can be automated. For professionals, skill degradation is a prerequisite to eventual replacement. According to Head, this "dumbing down" is joined at the hip with a dominant force in American capitalism, Scientific Man- agement. He calls it the "Great Unmentionable" of the CBS world and the information systems they've created. The central premise of Scientific Management and its "Taylorist ancestry" remains the separation of the detailed planning of work from its execution. He lifts the veil of obscurity that shrouds computer business sys- tems to reveal a disheartening reality of social control. Maybe we J U LY | A U G U S T 2 0 1 4 W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N A T I O N A L N U R S E 21

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