A powerful case against Google that deserves readers’ attention.
In this political book, a former insider at Google claims that the company attempted to control the information available to its users.
In response to Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, Google’s top executives marshaled a battle strategy to oppose his political plans, contends Vorhies, a senior engineer at the colossal company for more than eight years. According to the author, “The election of Donald Trump was a PROBLEM, which needed a SOLUTION.” Vorhies asserts that the solution was a program called Machine Learning Fairness, an artificial intelligence product designed to be a “new system of information control” that was nominally touted as a way to correct the “unconscious bias” of its users, but more ambitiously aimed to “redefine reality.” The ultimate goal, the author contends, was a dystopian attempt to bury narratives that didn’t support a left-leaning political agenda, a kind of far-reaching program of civic brainwashing. In strong language, Vorhies records his astonishment: “Oh my, God, communism is coming to the United States and it’s going to be brought by Google.” The author eventually resigned from his position as a matter of conscience and, with the assistance of Project Veritas, became a whistleblower. Vorhies’ account is substantiated by an impressive storehouse of evidence—he left Google with hundreds of pages from its internal servers documenting its political commitments as well as its project to combat “algorithmic unfairness.” His position is lucidly conveyed, accessible even to those with a minimum of technological sophistication. But his claims about Google are ensconced in a rambling and sometimes self-aggrandizing autobiography as well as in his complaints about how exhausted he was by “leftists who’d won every single battle in the culture wars for the past thirty years.” Still, his accusations against Google are gravely important, and worth readers’ wading through the meandering parts of his book—written with Heckenlively—to get to them.
A powerful case against Google that deserves readers’ attention.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-51-076736-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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