This book is either impeccably or imperfectly timed to capitalize on the unprecedented attention to global supply chains; Sims walks us through the hidden side of logistics and what it takes to get a world of goods from the factory floor to your front door. At times, his attention to detail is a little overwhelming, and this book is chock-full of details and local color that can be enlivening but also cause the book to drag a little. And, unfortunately, some of us have become an expert in supply chains given the impact of COVID on the economy. But if you want to be James Bond with a clipboard, this is a colorful introduction to the world of supply chains and logistics.

ARRIVING TODAY by Christopher Mims is an extremely timely book in which the Wall Street Journal technology columnist discusses "From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy." Mims offers a fascinating look at global supply chains – even though he started his research well before the current crunch. Early chapters focus on shipping and production in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam; Mims notes how outsourcing from the US first led to production in the "Asian Tigers" whose own rising wages have "pushed manufacturing down to the next and most geographically proximate countries on the economic ladder, including India, Thailand, Philippines, and Vietnam." He also explores productivity from "Taylorism" to "Bezosism." In tracing products around the world (how is it possible that salmon are caught near Scotland, filleted in China, and then returned to Scotland for sale?), Mims looks at numerous points in the distribution channel: container ships and ports; trucking and highways; warehouses and robots. He argues that tapping a button on your phone to order a consumer good that can arrive within 24 hours requires innovations and people who use them to "come together in a planetary-scale clockwork mechanism whose behavior is impossible to understand without building it up from the smallest constituent parts." The detail is impressive (did you know that shipping containers are only 0.075 inches thick but can be stacked 8 high?): more than ten percent of the book is devoted to notes on supporting data, plus a helpful index. Mims encourages readers to recognize that "In the twenty-first century, how things get to us matters as much as how they are made... in many ways the supply chain and the factory floor are now indistinguishable." ARRIVING TODAY received a starred review from Publishers Weekly which says: "Readers will be hooked by Mims's ability to turn what could've been a dry supply-chain explainer into a legitimate page-turner." I have ordered a copy – it’s arriving on our shelves soon!

Christopher Mims' ARRIVING TODAY was a fascinating and timely read I would highly recommend to all nonfiction readers, especially those interested in business or the impacts of Covid-19 on our society.

Mims takes readers on a journey, following the life of a product from inception to it's arrival on your doorstep. While the information provided is dense and detailed, Mims' writing stays engaging using interesting facts and vivid character portraits of the many varied men and women who make infrastructure on this scale possible. This title provides a microscopic look at supply chains and ponders important questions about the future of infrastructure, technology, and business. I was particularly engaged by the up-to-date material which examines the many impacts of the Covid pandemic on global infrastructure.

Sweeping Revelations And Generalities Need Better Documentation. As narrative nonfiction where facts are presented without documentation in favor of a more stylized, narrative based approach, this book works. And it does pretty well exactly what its description promises- shows the entire logistics industry from the time a product is assembled overseas through its travel to the port of origin to loading onto a ship to being offloaded from said ship onto trains and trucks into the very heart of fulfillment centers and delivery services all the way to your door. It uses a blended reality approach of the emerging COVID crisis, wherein Mims claims to have actually been in Vietnam as it was beginning to a more hypothetical "this is where this item was on this date"... right as global shipping began its "holiday everyday" levels of the early lockdown period in particular, and this approach serves it well as a narrative structure.

That noted, it also uses its less-documented, more-editorial nature to have constant political remarks, where YMMV on the editorial pieces and the documentation checks in at just 13% of the overall text. (More common range for bibliography sections in nonfiction ARCs tends to be in the 20-30% range in my own experience.) It is also questionable in its facts at times, for example when it claims that the US military's efforts in Vietnam were the drivers of ship-based containerization... which Bruce Jones' To Rule The Waves, to be released on exactly the same day as this book, shows in a much more documented fashion isn't exactly the case. For a reader such as myself that was growing interested in logistics and related issues even before the insanities erupted and who, in fact, read an ARC of Emily Guendelsberger's On The Clock (2019)- cited extensively when this text looks to Amazon and their fulfillment centers directly, among many other similar works such as Alex MacGillis' Fulfillment (2020), the aforementioned Jones text (2021), Plastic Free by Rebecca Prinz-Ruiz (2020), Driven by Alex Davies (2021), Unraveled by Maxine Bedat (2021), and even What's The Use by Ian Stewart (2021)... this book touched on a lot of issues I was already familiar with, mostly from more fully documented texts, but placed them in a comprehensive narrative structure that indeed flows quite well.

Read this book. It really is utterly fascinating, and many of the books referenced above face similar issues regarding their politics, to this one is hardly alone in that regard. But also read those other books to see their particular pieces in quite a bit more detail. Still, in the end this one was quite readable and is sure to generate much conversation among those who do read it. Very much recommended.