Though the author’s analysis stops short of cultural apocalypse, it does show how radically things have changed and why this...
An analysis of the significance of cultural memory and a warning about its fragility in the digital era.
“This is a little book about a big idea,” writes Rumsey, who specializes in information technologies, digital collecting and curation, and issues of intellectual property. The book is densely written, compressing the entirety of human documentation into less than 200 pages and suggesting what could happen amid the rapidity of cyber change that finds new versions overwriting old, even rendering old files unreadable and anachronistic in the span of a few years. We live in an era of data overload under private control, with our most personal information subject to the safeguarding of Facebook and Google, perhaps more available to data miners than to those whose lives it details. Rumsey warns that “it will be hard to avoid collective amnesia in the digital age” if we continue to entrust data preservation and control to private stewardship rather than the library model that is more open and comprehensive. Over the arc of human history, as far back as Socrates, there has been concern that recording memories might lead to a loss of personal memory. As recording on rock and clay gave way to papyrus, parchment, and paper, the records could proliferate but in a less durable form. Even by the Renaissance, there were concerns of the information overload of print—what to value, what was true. It was a selection process that cyber data makes all the more difficult. There is exponentially too much, and it is all too fragile. “The old paradigm of memory was to transfer the contents of our minds into a stable, long-lasting object and then preserve the object,” writes the author. “If we could preserve the object, we could preserve our knowledge. This does not work anymore.”
Though the author’s analysis stops short of cultural apocalypse, it does show how radically things have changed and why this is cause for concern.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62040-802-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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