Shimomura tells how he gained instant celebrity by helping the FBI nab famed hacker Kevin Mitnick; Markoff, a San Franciscobased reporter, made Shimomura an overnight sensation with front-page stories in the New York Times. Brought to the US from Nagasaki in the late 1960s when his biochemist father joined the Princeton faculty, Shimomura (now 31, the same age as Mitnick) proved a natural with computers early on. A Cal Tech dropout, he has held top research posts at blue-chip institutions like the federally financed San Diego Supercomputer Center (his current employer) and consults for a wealth of Silicon Valley enterprises and government agencies. While on a skiing holiday toward yearend 1994, Shimomura received word that an intruder had penetrated his systems and was monkeying with the files. Taking the incursion personally, he launched a determined effort to track and trap the assailant through the Internet. His efforts proved successful, and the Feds nabbed Mitnick in Raleigh, N.C., during the second week of February. While the details of how Shimomura trailed his quarry via cellular phone exchanges and other means are captivating, the many particulars of his life are less so. The nominal author also fails to note that the charges of telecommunications fraud originally leveled against Mitnick in North Carolina were subsequently dropped, and he was returned to California to face trial on older counts (including parole violation). Nor does the software sleuth make a very good job of putting cyberspace crime in perspective, thereby diminishing the significance of his own accomplishments. Although fascinating when the author sticks to techno- detection, there's too much background noise and score-settling with those who let him down during the cross-country chase. Readers who want the whole story should check Jonathan Littman's broader- gauged The Fugitive Game (p. 1687). (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-7868-6210-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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
PERSPECTIVES
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