A powerful assessment of how online information became unreliable—and what can be done about it.
Krohn, the former publisher of the online magazine Slate, offers a prescription for what ails online media.
The rise of online journalism has enabled the spread of misinformation on a scale never before seen in human history. Krohn’s book, written with Farmer, appears in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic, which has led to the dissemination of even more flawed information; it calls this time a “zero hour of reckoning,” but stresses that even when this immediate crisis passes, the problem with online information will remain the same: “Our digital world isn’t working. The eventual waning of the coronavirus crisis wouldn’t change that.” The pandemic has thrown a spotlight on a central problem, as Krohn sees it: “Internet culture had for years helped attenuate respect for expertise,” he writes. “It had elevated the random, anonymous shouter.” In a neat counterbalance, Krohn comfortably displays his own expertise on this subject on virtually every page, and every chapter is extensively footnoted. The book thoroughly grounds its discussion of internet culture’s growing fascination with falsehood in data, but it delivers it in a lively, peppery prose style that will keep the most tech-averse readers turning pages; it even includes a running storyline set in 2032, which speculates on the long-term outcomes of some of Krohn’s projections. He effectively describes a “five-way crossroads where media, elections, tech culture, marketing, and human behavior crash together”—and where conflicting claims can give readers a “bad case of the whirlies”; he then offers a five-point plan to begin the address this problem. His recommendations are wide-ranging and surprisingly non-technological, such as a renewed emphasis on teaching civics. Overall, the book will give pessimistic readers a bit of hope.
A powerful assessment of how online information became unreliable—and what can be done about it.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64146-532-8
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Made For Success Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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