A persuasive polemic aims to defang Big Tech—and improve life for everyone else.
Upgrading the online experience.
Doctorow coined the title word in 2022, comically capturing the zeitgeist-y view that today’s internet “sucks.” In this erudite yet breezy takedown of Big Tech, the novelist and activist targets deceptive search engine results, new “secret surveillance” tactics, and platforms that are increasingly hard to quit. The 2020s internet is frustrating and exploitative, he writes, because decades of corporate consolidation, enabled by permissive regulatory oversight, has resulted in “the cartelization and monopolization of our economy.” Thus occurs “enshittification,” under which companies without rivals “deliberately worsen” their services to enrich shareholders, mistreating customers without fear of consequences. The abuse varies by platform. “Once the fear of competition had been eliminated, making Google Search worse was a small price to pay for rising stock prices.” Subpar search results compel us to search again, enabling the company to show us more revenue-generating ads. Facebook uses a similar tactic, feeding us “ads and boosted content,” along with just enough useful stuff “to keep users glued to one another.” Sure, you can quit a platform, but you might lose contact lists or music you’ve bought. Doctorow devotes enlightening chapters to the push-pull between stockholder-pleasing tech executives and employees who don’t “put profit over mission.” Empowering the latter, perhaps through tech worker unionization, is key to better user experiences, he writes. The book’s final third offers ideas for encouraging competition and “high-quality regulations.” He’s for “muscular privacy” statutes and new standards that would make it easier to transfer data from one platform to another or use an iPhone without relying on Apple’s App Store. Doctorow has a gift for distilling complicated ideas. If we want a “new, good internet,” we’ve got to make Big Tech “weaker.” It’s a potentially galvanizing argument.
A persuasive polemic aims to defang Big Tech—and improve life for everyone else.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780374619329
Page Count: 352
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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