A well-intended and insightful but messy treatise.
Quirky but sprawling indictment of our Internet-dominated society.
Lanier, an iconoclastic speaker, columnist, computer scientist, musician and innovator of virtual-reality experiments in the 1980s, skewers the degeneration of the modern digital world. The author convincingly argues that changes in digital and software design affect human behavior, just as small changes in virtual-reality simulations modify the player's experience. One of the problems with the modern Internet culture, he writes, is that people get locked in, or confined, in their responses by the software they use, and hence lose their sense of individuality. They must conform to pre-defined categories in Facebook, and get automatically directed by Google search engines to Wikipedia entries that are bland and uninspiring. Lanier is particularly incensed by the “hive mind” mentality, which posits that group-think articles in Wikipedia are better than a creative, inspired article by someone who is a true expert on the subject. The flat structure of the Internet not only results in mediocre content, but allows for trolls, or anonymous users, who use their anonymity to behave badly and to trash others. It was also a blind belief in technology, Lanier asserts, that led to the financial debacle, as rogue traders relied on sophisticated computer algorithms without understanding what they were doing. The author is less convincing when he moves to a larger systemic argument about how an advertising-focused capitalist system directs money where the most clicks go, instead of toward individual talent. It's a difficult argument to prove, and his example of how pop music is less innovative now compared to music in the 20th century, while intriguing, seems a bit removed from the wider claims he makes about the creativity-stifling effects of big business. The last section, in which Lanier describes some inspiring potentials of modern computing, is a disjointed attempt to put a positive spin on a pessimistic view of modern technological culture.
A well-intended and insightful but messy treatise.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26964-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One does not like to apply the phrase too often in a book review, but here is a volume that should be required reading for...
Garrett, Newsday and former National Public Radio reporter, has written an excellent encyclopedic history—and jeremiad—of man versus microbe in the last decades of the century.
"California School Becomes Notorious for Epidemic of TB.'' "In a Panic, Rwandans Die in Stampede.'' No book about to be launched in 1994 could ask for better confirmation of its somber thesis than the front-page headlines in a recent edition of the New York Times. Only a few years ago science was celebrating an end to plagues and an extended life span, but now it appears that we are losing the battle against infectious illness. Microbes mutate as fast as companies synthesize new drugs to combat them. Jet travel, the sexual revolution, and overpopulation are just a few of the whole-earth changes that favor the survival of old and new bugs. In chapter by chilling chapter, Garrett recounts the stories of deaths from Machupo, Lassa, and Ebola diseases—viral infections decimating small villages in South America and Africa. In the best tradition of Berton Rouech, each account is a dramatic narrative with heroes and heroines: the doctors and epidemiologists who round up the usual suspects (rats, mice, bugs) to come up with answers. Modernity brings ironic twists—reused syringes, recycled air conditioning—to amplify infection. But the ultimate compounding factor is a "Thirdworldization,'' an ugly coinage to describe an ugly situation in which the inhabitants of poor nations are malnourished, displaced, terrorized, demoralized, e.g., Rwanda. Garrett chronicles AIDS, the spread of antibiotic-resistant TB and malaria, Legionnaire's disease, last year's re-emergence of Hanta viruses among the Navajo, along with chapters on microbial genetics and resistance. Prejudice and politics are given their due from clearly liberal Garrett, and a glimmer of a solution comes in the form of eternal vigilance and surveillance.
One does not like to apply the phrase too often in a book review, but here is a volume that should be required reading for policy makers and health professionals.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-12646-1
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
This study of Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell's impact on Irish nationalism and on the course of British politics traverses an already well-traveled road. Prolific English historian Kee (1939: In the Shadow of War, 1984, etc.) brings to Irish history a careful, unimpassioned view, which is useful in tracing the evolution of Parnell, an Anglo-Irish Protestant landlord with little early interest in politics, into a leader who embodied and directed the nationalism of the Irish people. After entering the House of Commons at the age of 28, Parnell quickly brought the art of obstruction to new heights, became chairman of the Home Rule party within six years, and within five more had brought the Liberal Government to the point of introducing a Home Rule Bill that would have been considered ``no more than a rhetorical chimera'' when he first entered Parliament. In doing so, he helped turn out two British governments, one Liberal and one Conservative, and, by maneuvering the Liberals into adopting Home Rule, helped to turn out a third. He did so by a remarkably skillful use of parliamentary procedure, by creating the first disciplined democratic party of modern times, and by maneuvering to hold the balance of power between the Liberals and the Conservatives. He remains, however, as Kee notes, an elusive figure, and it is hard now to understand why British Prime Minister William Gladstone called Parnell the most remarkable man he had ever met. His fall was as swift as his rise; he was cited as co- respondent in the divorce petition of one of his colleagues, Willie O'Shea, and the scandal compromised the course of Irish nationalism for the next generation. Parnell died in 1891 at the age of 45, just four months after he had married his mistress. A careful, considered, judicious biography, but uninspired and oh, so long.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-241-12858-7
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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