Being attentive is an acquired skill. Schwartz helps us think deeply and clearly about what it offers us.
A personal and professional study of the struggle with attention in an age of distraction.
After recounting her decadelong addiction to Adderall, journalist Schwartz (In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis, 2015) goes in search of attention in all its rather elusive manifestations, investigating its power to define a human life. In the process, she began to realize that the way all of us pay attention in this technological era had changed. Splintered attention and perpetual interruption are the norm. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Schwartz asks questions of singular significance: "Why are we so susceptible to all the escape routes our technologies offer us in the first place? What are we fleeing?" With a critical and open mind, the author assesses the works of such disparate writers as David Foster Wallace, Simone Weil, William James, and Aldous Huxley, and she applies no less rigor to exploring attention with such avatars of expanded consciousness as Stanislav Grof and Gabor Maté. Schwartz writes that the chief ingredients of attention are curiosity and joy and that attention is not only about having a meaningful life, but being in the moment, deriving pleasure from the very act of being absorbed in one's observations rather than burying one's self in a device. The author is unfailingly honest about her own addiction to the iPhone and her vulnerabilities and self-doubt. By personalizing her account, and her journey, she enhances the book's potency without diluting its authority. While techno-distractedness is not the sole province of the young, those who have known no other reality in their brief lives would seem to be most susceptible to the allure of Silicon Valley's steady stream of creations, each designed to be irresistible. Even though the author has “yet to enroll in a digital detox,” she points the way toward “helpful digital minimalism strategies.”
Being attentive is an acquired skill. Schwartz helps us think deeply and clearly about what it offers us.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4710-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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