A well-intentioned, personal presentation of how to find our way back from “the thickets of the tech jungle.”
A former Fox News and The View host ponders the ramifications of cellphones and other technology in her personal life.
It’s hard to conceive, but there was a time when cellphones, tablets, and other electronic devices were not an integral part of every waking moment, a time when people looked each other in the eye while having a conversation and didn’t respond immediately to every ping and buzz they heard. Bila (Outnumbered: Chronicles of a Manhattan Conservative, 2011) remembers those simpler days, and she set out to recapture them by eliminating her Pavlovian response to her cellphone and its constant notifications that somebody or something demanded her attention at that very moment. “While I know we can’t go backward,” she writes, “I’d sure like to move forward in a better way.” To that end, she shares stories of her phone and social media addiction and how this insatiable need to respond affected her deeply, many times negatively, as she missed out on sunsets and countless other real-world experiences. The author branches out beyond cellphones to discuss the implications for online gamers whose virtual lives interfere with their real ones, how Facebook “memories” can be harmful, and how robots have been integrated into so many aspects of life, including areas where they can make life-or-death decisions. Since nearly all of us use our phones constantly, Bila’s tale will appeal to a wide variety of readers. Though she doesn’t provide any groundbreaking research that hasn’t already been covered in other books, the narrative is a good reminder that in many cases, what we take in is trivial information while the important stuff continues all around us—and we often miss it.
A well-intentioned, personal presentation of how to find our way back from “the thickets of the tech jungle.”Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279706-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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