Opportunity beckons, and Case ably describes the possibilities, but the price of the chase may harm as well as benefit.
The founder of America Online outlines some of the potentialities he sees emerging in the “Internet of Everything.”
Case now invests in startups through his company, Revolution, but he also served as chairman of AOL-Time Warner and was the founding chair of President Barack Obama's Startup America Partnership. This veteran of the earliest generation of Internet architects—along with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, and others—still seems well-qualified to forecast what's ahead. He offers his own business history, primarily based in marketing and dealmaking (at both Procter & Gamble and Pizza Hut), as evidence that he knows the ropes. He identifies three sectors of economic activity as foci of the coming “Third Wave” of the Internet: health care, education, and food production, processing, and transportation. Each of these represents a partnership between government and the private sector aimed at achieving some public good. Case puts himself forward as a facilitator for future entrepreneurs to find their ways through the related labyrinths of political disputes and regulatory entanglement. “Successful engagement with government will be difficult, and it will take a willingness to listen, a foundation of respect, and a lot of patience,” he writes. “But it can work. It has worked. I know from experience.” Case’s vision of the future is compelling, but he may be overreaching when he emphasizes functions for third-party apps that could undermine professionally qualified expertise and challenge employment, earnings, and benefits. Case sees such apps being able to track the health care data of individuals. The danger is that they make use of previous public investment in the Internet to undermine existing regulatory structures and labor practices. New labor legislation will need to be overhauled, he writes, in order to make the envisioned changes possible.
Opportunity beckons, and Case ably describes the possibilities, but the price of the chase may harm as well as benefit.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3258-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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