A timely, focused, and thorough examination of a global engineering marvel that is very much still in the works.
The ascent of the driverless car.
Wired editor Davies knowledgeably examines the advent of the self-driving automobile through the perspectives of pioneering engineers and industry-leading entities. Early attempts to garner attention for this project manifested in a competition developed and funded by the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which, since its inception in 1958, was primarily tasked with protecting the nation from nuclear attacks but became flexible enough to embrace other pursuits. One of those endeavors was DARPA’s autonomous vehicle Grand Challenge race, promoted by the agency’s Stanford-trained engineer and director Tony Tether. In 2004, Tether encouraged entrants to construct a homemade, fully automated vehicle capable of traveling from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The winner of the race would receive $1 million. Though not one robot vehicle finished the inaugural race, when the contest was resurrected the following year, a winner, Stanford Racing Team’s vehicle “Stanley,” emerged victorious. Future incarnations resulted in increasingly stiff competition and unrivaled innovation. The author’s excitement for his subject translates vividly across pages of racing details and participants’ blueprints for success. Remaining fair in his assessment, Davies also addresses valid fears that automated vehicles may not have the capacity to effectively replace human intuition. The second half of the book centers around the melodramatic Silicon Valley battle between Uber Technologies and Google for control of a market that is vast yet still untapped. At the center of this feud is French American visionary Anthony Levandowski, whom Davies intensively profiles throughout the book. A brilliantly innovative engineer, entrepreneur, and former Google employee, Levandowski raced in the Grand Challenge competition with his Ghostrider, his unique two-wheeled automated motorcycle. Levandowski eventually became embroiled in a major criminal lawsuit involving his alleged theft and resale of confidential Google documents and trade secrets.
A timely, focused, and thorough examination of a global engineering marvel that is very much still in the works.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9943-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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