Sometimes too scholarly, but its contribution to the Google-vs.-publishers debate is well worth the jargon and technical...
The story of Google’s early attempt at creating a universal library with its “promises of making all the world’s information available to everyone.”
Marcum and Schonfeld, both of whom have long experience in the library world, begin their examination of the Google Books project by discussing the concept of a universal library, a “comprehensive library that is accessible to all,” an idea that dates back to the Great Library of Alexandria. In 2004, in the early days of information digitization as a practice, Google announced its plans to “allow simultaneous searches of ‘billions of web pages and texts of hundreds of thousands of books.’ ” After introducing Google’s vision, the authors chronicle the history of resource sharing in libraries, from the card catalog at the Library of Congress to the creation of interlibrary loan services and online databases. Then they move on to the specifics of Google’s ambitious project, which began with a partnership with five renowned university libraries and a number of publishing companies and ended up leading to the creation of a number of similarly themed projects. By sharing the views of both the librarians who supported the concept and those who were concerned about a library for everyone being controlled by a private company, the authors offer a nice overview, including the mechanics of the initial project, objections from publishers about copyright issues, and the court case that would ultimately decide the fate of the project. Throughout the heavily researched text, which benefits from interviews with librarians and other information professionals describing their experiences in “the early days of digitization,” the authors keep readers informed, despite dryly academic passages, of just how widely “the entry of Google into the library arena” would affect information sharing and librarianship today.
Sometimes too scholarly, but its contribution to the Google-vs.-publishers debate is well worth the jargon and technical terms.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-691-17271-2
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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