Apt and inapt arguments commingle in a passionate defense of free speech.
The CEO of PEN America suggests how to protect free speech in a digital age.
As Nossel notes in her debut book, Herbert Marcuse argued that “creating a broadly tolerant society demands intolerance of certain ideas, including right-wing ideologies.” With far-right extremism on the rise, his view is making a comeback, writes the author, and she rebuts it in a defense of free speech that alternately hits the mark and wanders far afield from First Amendment issues, dealing instead with cultural insensitivity or noninclusive language. In much of the first half, Nossel serves up unedifying bromides on how to respond to “unintended offenses” such as stereotyping millennials as “snowflakes” or “asking a fellow party guest if she’s pregnant when she isn’t.” The narrative gains traction when the author addresses urgent questions such as how to protect free speech while responding effectively to harmful material like online revenge porn, terrorist recruitment, and deepfake videos. Nossel, who has also served as the COO of Human Rights Watch, shows in chilling detail how tech companies are failing to moderate content appropriately. Google and Facebook, for example, “demote problematic posts, limiting how often they are seen without excising them entirely,” or “shadow ban” them by “suppressing social media users so that, unbeknownst to them, their posts and content cannot be seen by others.” The social media giants must become more transparent, argues Nossel, partly by notifying users promptly if they face sanctions. Throughout the book, the author argues persuasively that “informal self-governance” protects free speech better than corporate or government restrictions, but after reading her accounts of abuses by Silicon Valley behemoths, few readers are likely to disagree with one of her conclusions: “Mandated transparency is one area where government regulation of online content may be a positive step and would not entail intrusions on content in violation of the First Amendment.”
Apt and inapt arguments commingle in a passionate defense of free speech.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296603-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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