An intelligent and upbeat guide to helping young people master AI and to avoid being mastered by it.
A playbook for parents teaching their kids to thrive in a world of AI.
Children in this moment in the 21st century, warns Moody, will grow up in a world their parents won’t recognize or anticipate; “the tools they will use every day may not have been invented.” The questions weighing on the minds of many parents are very straightforward: Am I preparing my child for the right things? Is that even possible? The typical quick-fix answer is “start early, spend money, or your child falls behind.” This book is intended to offer a different kind of answer—the author points out that while new technologies come and go in constant waves of innovation, the right mindset for learning any new tech stays the same. Moody asserts that parents should observe closely, ask sharp questions, and “stay clear-headed when feelings run high.” The author, a data scientist and parent, outlines some strategies to build these skills in the specific context of dealing with AI. She explains the basics of what AI is, identifies some of the ways in which it’s infiltrated everyday life, and proposes approaches for young people to use it to their advantage without blunting their own excellence in the process. AI is governed by prompts, and Moody writes that “children who grow up asking precise, layered, follow-up questions will be able to use AI tools at a fundamentally higher level than children who do not.” The specific exercises she suggests perfectly reflect the book’s atmosphere of practical optimism—the author assiduously avoids any hint of doomsaying, a distinctive take regarding a technology that’s spawned a plethora of books warning of the inevitable AI takeover. “The children who grow up creating with AI will define the AI era,” she asserts. “The children who grow up consuming it will be defined by it.” This kind of cleareyed thinking about AI is very welcome.
An intelligent and upbeat guide to helping young people master AI and to avoid being mastered by it.Pub Date: May 30, 2026
ISBN: 9798996410828
Page Count: 133
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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