And what did Wilson get from the gun-printing project? Apart from “a lot of bitcoin” and “a lot of hate mail,” plenty of...
A self-styled anarchist serves up a troubling vision of autonomous action that begins and ends with the prospect of digitally producing one’s own firearms.
“We are the heartworms of history.” So, rightly, writes Wilson, the founder of the collective Defense Distributed. Veterinary metaphors aside, the author sagely observes that readers will respond to his project to manufacture guns using 3-D printers in terms of personal politics: if you’re a First Amendment absolutist or a firearms or technology enthusiast of a libertarian bent, then the thought of someone freely distributing blueprints for such weapons may not be troubling. However, if you’re an ordinary citizen, the thought of still more weapons—and weapons not easily detected by X-ray scanners and the like—may induce a chill. Certainly, as Wilson writes, the owner of the 3-D printer that he leased for the job felt that the use was inappropriate; despite his jailhouse-lawyer protestations, it demanded that the leased printer be returned, prompting the response that forms the taunting title of this book. The author sometimes spins off into Kerouac-ian reveries that presumably indicate what a free spirit he is (“Its stale flicker, in red and white and blue, would struggle tonight to beat back the wrathful blackness galloping from the east”), but mostly, this is a straightforward take on the question of whether the Constitution and other laws in fact permit such activities—as various government representatives argued was not the case. Wilson likens himself to Edward Snowden, but any high-mindedness comes off as being more on the level of a fraternity prank, if a lethal and illicit one.
And what did Wilson get from the gun-printing project? Apart from “a lot of bitcoin” and “a lot of hate mail,” plenty of notoriety and a thick police file. Whether he should also get fat royalties for this book depends on your politics, too.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7826-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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