A rejoinder to the anti-technological and a solid piece of pop-culture/business journalism.
When trouble comes calling, hit the joystick: an insider’s view of the good things that can emerge from being glued to a screen.
Many of the objections to the supposedly enslaving, attention-robbing powers of the video game, write digital developer Burak and tech journalist Parker, echo those leveled at comic books back in the day. Now comics are socially acceptable—the authors open with a sideways look at Art Spiegelman’s Maus, for which he won a Pulitzer—and video games seem poised to follow a similar trajectory, though the latter have spread throughout popular culture much more quickly. There are good reasons for this, and good results are possible in the bargain. For instance, Burak and Parker highlight former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s initiative to improve civics education in the United States after leaving the bench, an effort helped along by interactive technology. With a range of exercises and problems to solve, iCivics, says one booster, provides “a way to help kids find a fun way to connect with democracy.” Just so, new virtual reality technology allows boys to see the world through a girl’s eyes and vice versa, offering in turn a way to “promote empathy and eliminate gender and race bias.” The authors’ approach seldom goes much deeper than the human-interest story, but they range widely, from developers’ labs to efforts to teach youngsters how to code, all of which have combined to produce a massive library of institutional and independent games. That human-interest approach also introduces readers to some fascinating characters, among them Anna Anthropy, who took a childhood fascination with Ms. Pac-Man to homebrew a popular game about gender identity disorder, which “has long been held as a leading example of games’ ability to explore marginalized issues with emotional depth.”
A rejoinder to the anti-technological and a solid piece of pop-culture/business journalism.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08933-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
An intriguing meditation on the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it that should appeal to both...
Italian theoretical physicist Rovelli (General Relativity: The Most Beautiful of Theories, 2015, etc.) shares his thoughts on the broader scientific and philosophical implications of the great revolution that has taken place over the past century.
These seven lessons, which first appeared as articles in the Sunday supplement of the Italian newspaper Sole 24 Ore, are addressed to readers with little knowledge of physics. In less than 100 pages, the author, who teaches physics in both France and the United States, cogently covers the great accomplishments of the past and the open questions still baffling physicists today. In the first lesson, he focuses on Einstein's theory of general relativity. He describes Einstein's recognition that gravity "is not diffused through space [but] is that space itself" as "a stroke of pure genius." In the second lesson, Rovelli deals with the puzzling features of quantum physics that challenge our picture of reality. In the remaining sections, the author introduces the constant fluctuations of atoms, the granular nature of space, and more. "It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy—or in our physics,” he writes. Rovelli also discusses the issues raised in loop quantum gravity, a theory that he co-developed. These issues lead to his extraordinary claim that the passage of time is not fundamental but rather derived from the granular nature of space. The author suggests that there have been two separate pathways throughout human history: mythology and the accumulation of knowledge through observation. He believes that scientists today share the same curiosity about nature exhibited by early man.
An intriguing meditation on the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it that should appeal to both scientists and general readers.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-18441-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
