A mixture of delicious truths and ingenious sociological concepts that will convince most readers that we pay too much...
A worthy exploration of “how networks form and why they exhibit certain key patterns” as well as “how those patterns determine our power, opinions, opportunities, behaviors, and accomplishments.”
Early on in his first book for a general audience, Jackson (Economics/Stanford Univ.; Social and Economic Networks, 2008, etc.) looks at the friend paradox: Almost everyone has friends. Many people have the impression that others have more friends than they, and this is not neuroticism; it’s true. After all, popular people have more friends than unpopular people, so they are overrepresented on everyone’s list of friends, and people with few friends are underrepresented. People exaggerate the number of friends who drink and take drugs because these are social (i.e., networked) activities, and they underestimate the amount of non-networked behavior—e.g., studying. Social media amplifies this: 98 percent of Twitter users have fewer followers than those they follow. As a result, popular people exert a disproportionate influence simply because they appear to dominate our network. Jackson expands this to clearly reveal unnerving network effects in areas of our lives including journalism, public health, politics, economics, and the digital world. The wisdom of crowds is genuine. Given unbiased information, their conclusions are more accurate than any individual’s. Of course, the stupidity of crowds is equally genuine. The internet has triggered a vast expansion of human networks, but because we prefer people with behaviors and beliefs similar to ours (“homophily”), the last 20 years have seen an explosion of fake news, political polarization, and ugly nationalism. However, we have seen much of this before. “Humans,” writes the author, “have been rewired many times: by the printing press, letter writing, trains, the telegraph, overseas travel, the telephone, the internet, and the advent of social media. Perhaps it is our arrogance that leads us to assume that the current changes…are truly revolutionary and unique.”
A mixture of delicious truths and ingenious sociological concepts that will convince most readers that we pay too much attention to the people around us.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87143-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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