A concise analysis of how best to live within the brave new smartphone world.
How the ubiquity of smartphones has transformed society.
Sociologist Aschoff (The New Prophets of Capital, 2015) provides both historical context and political insight, showing what is new in the current technological revolution and recalling earlier times when technology upended the status quo. As “the new Gilded Age” of the subtitle suggests, the author reminds us of how the automobile changed everything, especially the economy. Yet while radical change was widespread, society survived the aftershocks and advanced. “People have always been anxious about new technology,” writes Aschoff, without minimizing the profound imbalances the smartphone underscores, especially in terms of economic and social inequality. She shows how activists have used the smartphone to document police brutality against black citizens while police (and the government at large) have employed the same technology of interconnection for monitoring and surveillance. Two of the most important recent social movements—#MeToo and Black Lives Matter—are both phenomena that have spread virally through a culture enabled by smartphones. At the same time, this culture has allowed the mobilization of white nationalists and other dangerous elements. We get our news on our phones, form our political beliefs, and see them echoed by like-minded partisans. The smartphone has all but dissolved the distinction between the personal and the political while changing the way we shop, date, and present ourselves to the outside world, with which we so often connect by smartphone. All the while, we are enriching and enabling global empires through collected data and underpaid labor. “Our fantasies about the digital frontier,” writes Aschoff, “hide the hierarchical and ecologically destructive relationships of global capitalism.” The author doesn’t advocate for opting out, nor does she believe that the worst-case scenario is inevitable. Instead, she offers advice for pushing back and establishing some personal autonomy in the fight for “digital justice.”
A concise analysis of how best to live within the brave new smartphone world.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6168-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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