An easily consumed, worthwhile addition to the literature reconstructing how the online world has become both profitable and...
An engrossing microcosm of the internet’s Wild West years, based on an ugly conflict between two eccentric innovators of online dating and pornography.
Rolling Stone contributing editor Kushner (Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D, 2017, etc.) delivers another digestible look at transformations spurred by unpredictable technologies, turning the dry topic of domain-name battles into a lively representation of the era’s hype, confusion, and outsized personalities. He writes about “an epic rivalry that established many of the rules that enable electronic commerce today….The war for Sex.com represents an essential, but overlooked, chapter behind one of the greatest inventions of our time: the internet.” The story revolves around two oppositional yet strangely similar figures: Gary Kremen, an unkempt computer innovator whose keen sense of what was next was embodied by his founding of the dating site Match.com, and Stephen Michael Cohen, a con artist, libertine, and tech enthusiast who developed the first sex-oriented bulletin board system in the early 1980s. Cohen was in prison in 1994, as Kremen was developing Match.com and, presciently, registering domain names based on perceiving their future profitability: “His plan was simple, to register each and every category of classified ads online.” Later, Cohen also took the Sex.com address, via forged paperwork, seeing its lucrative potential. The mercurial Kremen was astonished to discover the theft in the wake of his emotionally devastating ouster by the Match.com board. “Kremen didn’t know why or how Cohen had obtained what was rightfully his,” writes the author. This led to a complex, increasingly bitter legal battle. Kushner constructs this labyrinthine tale clearly, focusing on the experiences and outlooks of both Kremen and Cohen and chronicling his discussions with associates and early industry observers. He keeps it compelling by emphasizing the high stakes of their struggle for what the internet has since become, though the narrative sometimes meanders and finally seems anticlimactic.
An easily consumed, worthwhile addition to the literature reconstructing how the online world has become both profitable and pervasive.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2214-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
