Old-school journalism that has plenty to say about the new media and how we absorb information today.
The backbiting true story of the smartphone wars, as told from the point of view of the guys in the trenches.
The shadow of fellow Wired alum Steven Levy looms large over this new history by contributing editor Vogelstein, but in his debut nonfiction account of the spectacular meltdown between Apple and Google, the author takes a refreshingly different approach. Where Levy is always one of few journalists trusted with a new device before launch, much of Vogelstein’s account comes not from the storied minds of Steve Jobs, Larry Page or Sergey Brin, but from the engineers, fixers and financiers who put their careers on the line in the name of those individual visions. Rather than tracking the entire history of Apple like Walter Isaacson, Vogelstein opens with the second revolution, “The Moon Mission,” with Apple’s engineers sweating through one of Jobs’ famous live demonstrations of the iPhone. Most people outside the industry won’t remember that Apple and Google were actually in partnership for many years. Vogelstein painfully recalls the betrayal that Jobs felt when Google began moving into the sector and Jobs’ vehement reaction: “Apple did not enter the search business. So why did Google enter the phone business? Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them. Their Don’t Be Evil mantra? It’s bullshit.” This unhealthy competition makes for juicy reading, to be sure, but the author makes some very salient points about a post-tablet world and the future of the media. “It’s not just that two of the biggest, most influential corporations in their worlds—Apple and Google—are fighting each other to the death,” he writes. “It’s that the mobile revolution they set off has suddenly put nearly $1 trillion in revenue from half a dozen industries up for grabs.”
Old-school journalism that has plenty to say about the new media and how we absorb information today.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-10920-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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
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