A spirited exploration of tech by a devotee who holds out the hope that bright things are just around the corner.
The author has seen the future, and it wears a headset.
Perhaps better known for his hairstyle and hippie-ish ways (“in those days, it was super rare for white people to have dreadlocks, so I was quite exotic”) than for any specific bit of technology, computer pioneer and civil libertarian Lanier (Who Owns the Future?, 2013, etc.) has two purposes here. The first is to offer a vision of what virtual reality is and the cool things it can do, while the second is an amiable tour through his life and his perhaps unlikely course through the very beginnings of VR. As to the former, suffice it to say that Lanier was a smart, geeky kid who was thinking outsize thoughts even as a child (“I was obsessed with what’s usually called philosophy, and it helped”), and he had the benefit of growing up in an eccentric household that encouraged his explorations. As to the latter, working in a state university computer lab to wrestle out the secrets of code and algorithm, Lanier writes that he got hooked early on—not just by the nerdy coolness of the computer world, but also by the outright wonder of the sci-fi things it can bring to real life. In that aspect, the author is an evangelist for the good side of VR, which now offers insights into human perception and cognition that are forcing a radical re-evaluation of who we are. That’s definitely cool stuff. In relating it, Lanier veers between the plainspoken (“the human brain is so finely tuned to watching the human face that if anything is slightly off, the strangeness quickly becomes creepy”) and the mystical (“if the whole universe is your body, then talking would be beside the point”), with lots of solid tech-manual ponderings on phenotropic systems and formulas to boot.
A spirited exploration of tech by a devotee who holds out the hope that bright things are just around the corner.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-409-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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