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 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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