A well-written commentary on one of the most pressing social issues of our time.
A former Obama strategist reflects on the state of modern media.
In the book’s introduction, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick describes Slaby as “one of the geniuses behind” President Barack Obama’s “then-revolutionary digital [campaign] strategy.” As the Obama campaign’s deputy digital director in 2008 and chief integration and innovation officer in 2012, Slaby oversaw “dozens of digital firsts” by a presidential candidate, including the first Facebook and Twitter accounts. Slaby, at the forefront of digital politics, is uniquely positioned to provide insights into the shifting landscape of media in the 21st century, which not only propelled Obama into office, but also spawned the tea party movement, exacerbated political divisions, and facilitated the mass dissemination of disinformation. Combining erudite analyses of social theories, such as Jurgen Habermas’ notion of the public sphere, with an accessible, occasionally witty, writing style, the author emphasizes the major paradox of today’s media systems and technologies that “are ostensibly meant to connect us” yet excel at providing “increasingly isolated sets of information.” After providing a convincing narrative on “Broken Promises” of modern media, where “popularity masquerades as credibility, and credibility seems like a function of little more than repetition,” the second half of the book provides practical solutions to reform both the media we consume as well as American civic life in general. A protégé of Obama, Slaby is relentlessly optimistic even while acknowledging the contemporary cesspool of new media platforms and the failures of traditional media outlets, and the book successfully blends sophisticated analysis with an uplifting, engaging message. Though some may question the author’s confidence in the general public’s ability to discern fact from fiction, they will still find plenty of pragmatic solutions.
A well-written commentary on one of the most pressing social issues of our time.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63331-051-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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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
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