Next book

CITIZENVILLE

HOW TO TAKE THE TOWN SQUARE DIGITAL AND REINVENT GOVERNMENT

Empowering, motivating and just a tad self-indulgent.

A former mayor of San Francisco introduces methodology to improve citizens’ interaction with their government through the Internet.

Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, reflects fondly on his mayoral terms and his efforts to accelerate the learning curve for an often bogged-down city government operating “on the cutting edge—of 1973.” As founder of an impressive array of small Bay Area businesses, the author understands the power and influence technology can wield—but how to harness and channel it to engage smart, forward-thinking consumers with their respective bureaucracies? Overcoming governmental “technophobia” is key to bridging that gap, but disinterest, privacy concerns and procurement costs are also roadblocks. Newsom cites many affirmative initiatives on data sharing, governmental transparency and numerous interactive applications like QR codes or his “Citizenville” gaming concept. While conducting research, the author came into contact with a host of technologically savvy professionals, from software pioneers and hyperproductive tech executives to fellow entrepreneurs and even George Clooney, who laments the death of individual privacy. Newsom’s pitch for a compulsory donation system to co-fund government projects or the concept of incentivizing to gain more rapid solutions is certainly progressive. An idea to offer $1 billion to the innovator of a cure for a constantly morphing disease like AIDS, however, comes off like a lofty campaign promise. Still, the book remains fresh and lively with Newsom emerging as a persuasive, if fast-talking, progressive proponent focused on how best to “radically rethink the relationship between citizens and government.”

Empowering, motivating and just a tad self-indulgent.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-59420-472-2

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

Next book

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

Close Quickview