Informative, entertaining reading for nontechies.
An insider’s account of the mapping technology that gave rise to Google Maps.
Google’s mapping service provides satellite imagery, street maps, panoramic street views, real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for about 1 billion users monthly. A popular app on iPhones and other devices, it has spurred industries from Yelp to Priceline to Uber. In this bright, highly personal debut, Kilday, a vice president at Niantic, which developed the augmented reality game Pokemon Go, describes his role in the mapping story, from the 1999 inception of a struggling tech startup named Keyhole, through the technology’s enormous exposure as part of CNN’s 24/7 coverage of the U.S.–led Iraq invasion, and the 2004 acquisition of Keyhole by Google, which turned the software into wildly popular Google Maps and Google Earth. Drawing on his experiences as marketing director at both Keyhole and Google Maps, the author crafts an engaging, blow-by-blow account of people and events that made mapping an unusually powerful tool for the military and intelligence communities, for commercial real estate interests, and eventually for anyone looking for a street address or just curious to see his or her house from the vantage of a satellite. A constant note taker, Kilday offers colorful details on life inside the Googleplex (turf wars, pool and dart games, and walk-ons by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, etc.), where the Keyhole team realized only gradually that “Google was launching a moonshot mapping effort to transform how we find our way in the world.” In recounting the effort, he describes the technology’s role in saving lives during Hurricane Katrina and in the advent of self-driving cars, and he offers accessible descriptions of satellite imagery and the operation of Google’s hundreds of Street View vehicles. Writing with warmth and humor, the author has great fun recalling life as a state-college alum working among intense Stanford graduates.
Informative, entertaining reading for nontechies.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267304-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2018
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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