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MIRROR WORLDS

ON: THE DAY SOFTWARE PUTS THE UNIVERSE IN A SHOEBOX...HOW IT WILL HAPPEN AND WHAT IT WILL MEAN

Within ten years, Gelernter (Computer Science/Yale) predicts here, scientists will deploy computer systems able to capture extensive data about a particular ``reality'' (hospital, city, etc.), and to present a constantly updated model on a desktop computer. ``A Mirror World is some huge institution's moving, true-to- life mirror image trapped inside a computer—where you can see and grasp it whole,'' Gelernter writes. Citizens will be able to visit these computer models like public squares, gaining unprecedented access to data on what's going on (and the officials in charge, the author intimates, will presumably welcome a chance to have their performance monitored). Building such mirror worlds will be extraordinarily difficult: streams and rivers of raw data need to be constantly flowing; thousands of computers must process the data in parallel fashion; and tying it all together will demand new kinds of software of immense complexity. Gelernter explains clearly the problems to be solved and describes pieces of the technology already working in research labs. Left unchallenged is his assumption that such technology will remain benign—giving honest folk a way of grasping an ever-more complex world instead of providing the powerful owners of such technology a superb way to distort and control ``reality.'' Plausible but potentially frightening view of what the future could hold if those who view ``reality'' as merely a vast array of numbers waiting to be crunched have their way. (Twenty illustrations—not seen.)

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-19-506812-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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