Cubed The Secret History of the Workplace [Paperback]

A New York Times Notable Book •Daily BeastBest Nonfiction of 2014• Inc.Magazine's Most Thought-Provoking Books of the Year

“Man is born free, but he is everywhere in cubicles.”

How did we get from Scrooge’s office to “Office Space”? From bookkeepers in dark countinghouses to freelancers in bright cafes?  What would the world be like without the vertical file cabinet? What would the world be like without the office at all? InCubed, Nikil Saval chronicles the evolution of the office in a fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is. Drawing on the history of architecture and business, as well as a host of pop culture artifacts—fromMad Mento Dilbert (and, yes,The Office)—and ranging in time from the earliest clerical houses to the surprisingly utopian origins of the cubicle to the funhouse campuses of Silicon Valley,Cubedis an all-encompassing investigation into the way we work, why we do it the way we do (and often don’t like it), and how we might do better.

Praise forCubed:

... Excellent ... fresh and intellectually omnivorous ... Saval is a vigorous writer, and a thoughtful one. What puts him above the rank of most nonfiction authors, even some of the better ones, is that he doesn’t merely present information. He turns each new fact over in his mind, right in front of you, holding it to the light.
—Dwight Garner,The New York Times

Cubedis...a pleasure to read: beautifully written and clearly organized. Since many Americans now, women as well as men, spend more than half their waking hours at work, it's also an important exploration.
—Richard Sennett,The New York Times Book Review

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