Though Banister mostly places a new body on an old chassis, he gives a profound sense of the individual and societal power...
Media industry executive Banister offers sharp insights into the latent value of networked media, plus some admittedly hazy speculations into the value of its application relative to user creativity.
The author builds a strong base by simply asking the right questions: What is media? What is networking? And “how to employ networked media (whether existing or nascent) in ways that are native, self-sustaining, and profitable (if that is the aim)”? First, Banister wants to get past the net con, the marketing of promises with inordinate faith in the unknown, all those disastrous IPOs in which “they were selling a religion, more than a company.” While the burst bubble may have hampered investment and made innovation more difficult, he suggests that all our digital tools can be molded into a metamedia, an evolutionary catalyst in myriad point-to-point combinations for business and society, an interconnectedness that must aspire to predictability, responsibility, and profitability (though Banister never overplays the capital-generating aspects of the medium). He sees a lot of old business models behind such surviving networked companies as eBay and Amazon, which “simply ensur[e] that incoming revenue exceeds outgoings expenses” with a “dogged commitment to custom technology invented and deployed.” More problematic, or at least less intuitive, are Banister’s musings on the potential interface between virtual and actual (for instance, the expression of an artist’s intentions versus actualization) or on how “storydwelling,” a participatory, experiential, and immersive form, will compare to the ancient art of storytelling. As the author notes, the influence of networking on the marketplace in terms of consumer demand has already been immense, but perhaps his most intriguing speculations concern the part a network could play in enacting issue-by-issue political expression, putting the beauty of participatory democracy within grasp.
Though Banister mostly places a new body on an old chassis, he gives a profound sense of the individual and societal power inherent within networked media.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-9724562-6-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Agate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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