A welcome, centrist guide to implementing AI in government.
Hoque, Nelson, and Davenport advocate for the mindful implementation of AI technology for government agencies in this nonfiction guide.
As government agencies confront the AI revolution, the question is not whether they will embrace it, but how: “the pay-off is potentially revolutionary: enhanced public services, improved operational efficiency, and a complete revisioning of the relationship between agencies and the public they serve.” Per the authors, AI is an inevitable tool that will be implemented across a broad spectrum of organizations and lifestyles, making systematic implementation necessary for government services. Acknowledging this technological imperative, the authors advocate a balanced, mindful approach to AI implementation grounded in three major frameworks, called OPEN, CARE, and the portfolio approach. These structures address the need for mindful implementation, agency missions and values, inherent risks and strategies to mitigate them, and the importance of diversifying AI investments for a sustainable program. The authors argue that these frameworks will not work for agencies that fail to recognize the cultural shifts necessary to accommodate AI and don’t prioritize change management, sustainability, and employee input. While many books in this genre take a “moonshot” approach to AI implementation, praising its potential and advocating technological advancement for its own sake, this work offers a welcome centrist perspective. The authors’ emphasis on mindful and balanced implementation is refreshing, and the various theories drawn from business, technology, and organizational management provide a solid foundation for their case. They describe the frameworks in detail to ensure reader understanding, making this a practical introductory guide. The authors use examples from government agencies worldwide both to highlight success stories and to analyze failed initiatives to effectively drive the points home. The prose is clean and clear, oriented toward the technologically uninitiated, and the text includes helpful charts and matrices, but while the book is accessible, the general audience may wish to skip this one, as it’s clearly intended for organizational leadership in the public sector.
A welcome, centrist guide to implementing AI in government.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9798895654354
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 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.
