A stimulating overview of one of the central issues of our time.
Solove reflects on the challenges posed by technology to privacy.
According to the author, a law professor specializing in intellectual property, the “dizzying pace of changing technologies” constitutes a profound challenge to the protection of privacy, one that largely has not been met with an adequate response. In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation of 2016 is a “grand achievement” and a “terrific law,” per Solove, but it still does not do enough, and the many laws around the globe modeled upon it are considerably less effective. At the heart of the problem, the author argues with an impressive blend of provocation and prudence, is a lot of muddled thinking about privacy—more specifically, the employment of metaphors that confuse rather than clarify. (For example, artificial intelligence is simply not intelligence—it’s just a lot of “math plus data.”) Moreover, contrary to the dystopian narrative famously proposed by George Orwell in 1984, the author observes that the surveillance of individuals is rarely noticed, and almost no one feels inhibited by it. In fact, Solove posits, the entire discussion about privacy is usually misconceived, and his searching treatise aims to set clear parameters for future debate. Ultimately, the author contends that protecting privacy is really about power: “The law can naively hope that virtue or restraint will do the work of regulation, that organizations will just do the right thing, that the lion will lay down with the lamb. In reality, however, power rarely yields to anything except power.” Solove is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor of Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the George Washington University Law School, and his expertise is beyond reproach. He’s been thinking about this important issue for a quarter century, and as a result his reflections achieve an admirable depth. For such a brief study—the book is not much longer than 100 pages—an extraordinary expanse of intellectual territory is traversed with rigor and subtlety.
A stimulating overview of one of the central issues of our time.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780197771686
Page Count: 136
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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