A handy user's manual for leading an online life full of meaning and connection.
With the pandemic having moved so many of our "real life" activities online, here’s a relevant investigation into what it means to be "real" in virtual space.
Can online platforms help us find true connection? Stedman is a natural guide to the complex world of digital tools that can help us map out our lives and teach us how to be human. Born in 1987, the author never knew life without the internet. His background as a queer “humanist community organizer” and atheist representative in interfaith groups shapes his worldview, which is inclusive and always questioning. Stedman challenges the conventional notion that a life lived primarily on social media is necessarily superficial or less "authentic" than so-called "real life." Chronicling his experiences with gamers and “furries” (“people who create and sometimes play out animal alter egos”), among other specific social communities, the author explores how technology can help marginalized and/or geographically remote people connect. His personal history confirms this idea: As a closeted gay teenager, Stedman found crucial support online. While it’s true that privileged people can colonize digital landscapes by co-opting memes and slang from people of color and other marginalized communities, at their best, social networks can enable disempowered people to document their lives and grow movements such as Black Lives Matter. Social media, though often overrun with "cries for help or attention, and the parade of personal successes," can also function as an avenue for personal growth. Digital life gives us a space to reimagine ourselves and play with our identities. Stedman is vigilant about citing scholarly texts to support his arguments, but he ties academic theories to experiences by relating stories from his personal life—even if "social media has shown me more clearly the importance of keeping some things private." In fact, "if we want to feel real in the digital age, we need to make a habit of disconnecting” periodically for “perspective taking.”
A handy user's manual for leading an online life full of meaning and connection.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5064-6351-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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