Bristling with facts and ideas expressed in a high-energy, cliffhanger style.
A deep dive into one of today’s most pertinent psychological problems.
As Hari demonstrates, the fractured state of your attention span has more insidious causes and more drastic outcomes than you ever imagined. Tormented by his own inability to focus, the author traveled the world to speak to researchers and also abandoned his phone and computer to spend three months screen-free in Provincetown. The latter was liberating, enabling him to once again read books, have creative thoughts, and sleep well. Unfortunately, these effects didn't last long once he reconnected. As he learned from expert interviews, the causes of our attention issues are so vast that telling someone they can improve their plight by making personal adjustments is known as cruel optimism, “when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture—like obesity, or depression, or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution.” The trouble is not just in our devices, but in our air, food, workplaces, the way we raise children, the surveillance of our lives by corporations, and more. Social media is especially dastardly, and Hari offers numerous appalling examples: Because feeling angry is more likely to keep your attention than any other emotion, YouTube has recommended videos by belligerent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, such as the one claiming Sandy Hook was faked, 15 billion times. In Brazil, Facebook was used to swing an election in a way that sounds eerily familiar: filling people’s heads “full of grotesque falsehoods, to the point where they can’t distinguish real threats to their existence (an authoritarian leader pledging to shoot them) from nonexistent threats (their children being made gay by penises painted on baby bottles).” Systemic change is the key to any possible solution, but some of Hari’s suggestions sound like more cruel optimism. Still, the author brings to light many important issues.
Bristling with facts and ideas expressed in a high-energy, cliffhanger style.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-13851-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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