by Andrew Keen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 22, 2012
Occasionally insightful but tiresome and scattershot.
An Internet entrepreneur and critic rails against the inexorable growth of social media.
Keen (The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, 2007) claims that the onslaught of social media and the willingness of users to share every detail of their lives online signify that “we are forgetting who we really are.” The author takes on serious issues like privacy concerns and how online communities create real-world isolation, and he offers thoughtful analysis of what a shared online experience could mean for the future. But despite his passion, the author never creates a satisfying argument and struggles to establish connections between past events and the online realm today. For example, he unconvincingly tags the “narcissistic generation” of 1960s “bohemians” as the forerunners of the “free-floating, fragmented butterflies of today’s age of Foursquare, SocialEyes and Plancast.” Keen’s tendency to ping from subject to subject—e.g., from the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to Vermeer’s 17th-century painting Woman in Blue Reading a Letter to Orwell’s 1984—confuses considerably more than it elucidates. Lacking historical analogies for other points, the author falls back on excessively provocative statements, often without any evidence to back them up—a social reading app, for example, would herald “the end of solitary thought.” Adding to the jumble is Keen’s heavy-handed insistence on drawing parallels between our online lives and the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Vertigo—he even devotes nearly an entire chapter to the movie’s plot—possibly in an attempt to justify his book’s title.
Occasionally insightful but tiresome and scattershot.Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-62498-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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BOOK REVIEW
by Andrew Keen
BOOK REVIEW
by Andrew Keen
by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Lulu Miller illustrated by Kate Samworth ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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