Having chronicled the digital-data brigandage of the notorious Kevin Mitnick (The Fugitive Game, 1996), Littman casts a cool, discerning eye on Kevin Poulsen, who led law-enforcement agencies in a merry chase along the Information Highway. Drawing on extensive interviews with 31-year-old Poulsen, his partners in crime, and the cops who chased them down, the author offers an absorbing, evenhanded portrait of the hacker as a dangerous young man. A technical virtuoso before he was out of his teens and in trouble with authorities early on, the disaffected young Californian (whose on-line alias, The Watchman, was taken from the antihero of a dark-side comic series) also held responsible programming jobs at both SRI and Sun Microsystems before his Pacific Tel break-ins and other computer felonies made him officially unemployed. Going outlaw on a full-time basis, Poulsen trespassed on the memory banks of machines linked by modem on the Internet, exposed the security weaknesses of government and university installations, played embarrassing pranks on rivals, and otherwise showcased his considerable talents for electronic wizardry. He rigged a contest run by an L.A. radio station (by diverting its phone lines) and collected a couple of Porsches as prizes. He also managed to ferret out wiretaps Big Brother's helpers (FBI, Secret Service, et al.) had planted on the ACLU, foreign consulates, suspected mobsters, and others. Despite his professed allegiance to a hacker code, Poulsen was not fastidious about profiting from his skills, putting them at the disposal of call-girl rings and shady private detectives. Eventually brought to book in 1990 on a wealth of charges, the chronic offender was allowed to cop a plea in the interests of protecting the feds' dirtier secrets. An arresting account of the career of a New Age intruder whose capacity to strike at will mocks the very notion of computer privacy and security. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 31, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-52857-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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
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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