A timely and engaging analysis of digital life, even if it doesn’t always extend beyond familiar critiques.
An Atlantic columnist examines how modern society has eroded the tactile pleasures that make daily life feel meaningful.
This book’s opening chapter is titled “What If Contentment Were Easy?” Bogost offers this message: “You can keep pursuing big goals and meaningful relationships, while also enjoying every moment just a little more.” He writes from this premise by centering senses—deemed as “simple pleasures”—as a counter to disconnection from contemporary life. Through interviews and reflections, the book alternates between moments of sensory engagement or its absence: for example, whether a woman stuck in traffic finds solace in the touch of the steering wheel against her knuckles or a local reporter reflects on journalism’s shift from a once-social profession into an office-bound routine. The prose extends an almost club-like invitation: “The more you allow yourself to accept the weird, wonderful gifts that ordinary life constantly offers, the more their offerings will feel desirable, even transformative.” Of course, the journey to embracing the sensory world comes with its challenges—structural and personal. There’s a moment in which a house painter is surprised to see the author participate in home repairs, raising questions about how manual labor is framed as a distraction from work or family life rather than a missed sensory connection. The most striking section considers the role of cell phones: “You walk into your living room to find your spouse or son on the couch, staring or tapping into a device. What are they doing? you wonder. Email? Television? Pornography? Shopping? Which is also to ask, What other, foreign, spaces have they conjured into the shared space of the home? The answer is often unknowable and, in any case, just as quickly replaced by another space as one app backgrounds and another comes to the fore. A proliferation of non-places wasn’t the problem, it seems. Instead, technology has allowed personal intimacy and connection to flourish too much, and anywhere.”
A timely and engaging analysis of digital life, even if it doesn’t always extend beyond familiar critiques.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781668062630
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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