Comprehensive but one-sided and surprisingly bland.
Fortune senior editor for Internet and technology Kirkpatrick delivers a data-heavy, analysis-light biography of the Internet’s second-most-visited site.
Facebook grew from 10,000 users in early 2004 to 350 million users as of January 2010, essentially redefining social networking in the process. Considering that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook as a sophomore in college, the author’s awestruck tone is forgivable, though eventually exhausting. How Facebook managed such a meteoric rise while (so far) avoiding the Friendster effect is Kirkpatrick’s central subject. The author chronicles the defining events that made Facebook what it is today—its portentous tussles over privacy with its birthplace, Harvard; the sustained exponential growth of Facebook’s user base; the adolescent growing pains of its office culture; the personal clashes among its founders and executives; its massive, unprecedented financial valuation and subsequent courting by investors like the Washington Post Company, Accel and Microsoft. Kirkpatrick makes it abundantly clear that Facebook owes its success primarily to Zuckerberg, and the author devotes nearly equal attention to illuminating Zuckerberg’s (in)famous reticence and surprisingly shrewd business sense as he does to charting the rise of his brainchild. Disappointingly, the author sidesteps sociological analyses of how Facebook influences its users. Though Facebook owes its existence to Zuckerberg’s tenacity, prescience, intelligence and apparent commitment—typically at the expense of short-term profit—to building nothing less than a new mode of communication, far more interesting would’ve been deeper examinations of Zuckerberg’s new mode of communication as it shapes our societies, governance and our personal identities. In the introduction, Kirkpatrick promises to explore these questions, but readers hungry for a meaty cultural critique may feel cheated by what is essentially a lengthy corporate biography.
Comprehensive but one-sided and surprisingly bland.Pub Date: June 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0211-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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