A powerful memoir of overcoming adversity that also effectively interrogates the concept of meritocracy.
An account of growing up in institutions and foster care by a Harvard graduate and former Google employee.
After her parents divorced, Nietfeld’s father transitioned from male to female; her mother, who won custody, “was a hoarder with mental issues.” The family home became uninhabitable. At 13, Nietfeld checked into a psych ward, “luxuriat[ing] in the endless hot water, the meals that came on trays,” and later attempted suicide. After talking to a social worker, she entered a residential eating disorder program. Over the course of the narrative, the author shows how her various diagnoses (bulimia, psychosis) were reactions to her mother’s inability to care for her. In fact, her mother’s willingness to let the state take custody of her only daughter appears almost blithe; she appears chiefly in cameos. The turning point in the narrative comes when, while institutionalized, Nietfeld became obsessed with getting into an Ivy League college, a dream no one took seriously. She learned that her success would be determined not merely by her GPA or SAT scores, but also by how much she was willing to mine her family history for admissions-essay fodder. She had to learn how to play the game: to be a “good survivor” and “exemplify post-traumatic growth, not post-traumatic stress disorder.” Though Nietfeld graduated from Harvard with a lucrative job offer from Google, this is not just a bootstrapping tale. The author offers a complex meditation on desperation, leveraging personal pain, and how the drive to achieve can be a gift and a pathology simultaneously. “All I’d wanted growing up was to read books and study, but instead I learned how few acceptable ways there were to need help,” she writes. “You had to be perfect, deserving, hurt in just the right way….Everyone who dealt with disadvantaged kids, from therapists to college admissions officers, treated us as if we could overcome any abuse or neglect with sheer force of will.”
A powerful memoir of overcoming adversity that also effectively interrogates the concept of meritocracy.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48947-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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For those satisfied with blame-the-victim tidbits of received wisdom.
The noted conservative economist delivers arguments both fiscal and political against social justice initiatives such as welfare and a federal minimum wage.
A Black scholar who has lived through many civil rights struggles, Sowell is also a follower of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who insisted that free market solutions are available for every social problem. This short book begins with what amounts to an impatient declaration that life isn’t fair. Some nations are wealthy because of geographical advantages, and some people are wealthy because they’re smarter than others. “Some social justice advocates may implicitly assume that various groups have similar developed capabilities, so that different outcomes appear puzzling,” he writes. In doing so, he argues, they fail to distinguish between equal opportunity and equal capability. Sowell is dismissive of claims that Black Americans and other minorities are systematically denied a level playing field: Put non-white kids in charter schools, he urges, and presto, their math scores will zoom northward as compared to those in public schools. “These are huge disparities within the same groups, so that neither race nor racism can account for these huge differences,” he writes, clearly at pains to distance himself from the faintest suggestion that race has anything to do with success or failure in America. At the same time, he isn’t exactly comfortable with the idea that economic inequalities exist, and he tries to finesse definitions to suit his convictions: “The terms ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ are misleading in another and more fundamental sense. These terms apply to people’s stock of wealth, not their flows of income.” As for crime? Give criminals more rights, he asserts, as with Miranda v. Arizona, and crime rates go up—an assertion that overlooks numerous other variables but fits Sowell’s ideological slant.
For those satisfied with blame-the-victim tidbits of received wisdom.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781541603929
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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