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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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