The Oppressed Middle: Politics of Middle Management and Scenes from Corporate Life

The Oppressed Middle is a collection of forty “scenes from corporate life,” all intended to support Earl Shorris’s thesis that corporate management is totalitarian. Perhaps this is not an entirely original argument, but Shorris backs it up with a thoughtful review of the philosophy of totalitarianism and with perceptive examples that are frequently short story masterpieces. Even if much of his thesis is wrong or incomplete, I love books that cause you to think about familiar subjects in comprehensively original ways.