A brisk, well-informed, and urgent message.
A deep dive into the muck of fake news.
In the latest book in a growing genre, journalist Brill, author of The Teamsters and America’s Bitter Pill, examines the “toxic mix” of misinformation, disinformation, myths, alternative “facts,” and conspiracy theories that have proliferated online, leading to a lack of belief in shared truths, distrust in the legitimacy of science and expertise, and an erosion of our sense of community. He traces the current chaos to Section 230, a 1995 law allowing internet providers to police their own platforms and granting them immunity over content, no matter how ill informed or harmful. Although the intent of the law was “to maintain the robust nature of Internet communication,” Brill gives ample evidence to prove that, instead, it vastly undermined truth. In 2018, he and Gordon Crovitz founded NewsGuard to rate the trustworthiness of the most-visited sites, using criteria such as transparency of ownership and correction of mistakes. Although providers said that they supported the effort, Brill and Crovitz realized they had been naïve and clueless: “The problem,” Brill sees, “was their business plan,” which was to encourage engagement on their sites. Sensational, angry, polemic content drives engagement and therefore attracts advertising money. Because of the layers of people involved in placing ads, the companies advertised don’t know where their ads appear, so they end up supporting toxic sites that promote mis- and disinformation. While providers hired dedicated employees to staff their trust and safety teams, Brill found them to be “marginal mitigators” at best. Underscoring the acute need for reform, the author offers suggestions, including amending Section 230 to account for dangerous algorithms, ending online anonymity, directing the Federal Trade Commission to enforce providers’ contracts with users to protect them from harmful content, and bolstering online news and information literacy for K-12 students.
A brisk, well-informed, and urgent message.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780525658313
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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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