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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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