A hard look at Internet culture and the wunderkind it failed in the end.
The spectacular life and tragic downfall of an American iconoclast.
In his debut, Slate correspondent and Columbia Journalism Review contributing editor Peters attempts to bring controversial concepts around content ownership and open access into context by examining the life and untimely death of one of the country’s most visible advocates for “content liberation,” Aaron Swartz (1986-2013). However, the book is an expansion of the author’s 2013 Slate article of the same name, so the new material feels like filler at times. But Peters presents a compelling sketch of a genius with real troubles, much of it presented through his subject’s own words. Swartz was many things, from a serial entrepreneur to a fundamental agent in the creation of initiatives like Creative Commons and Reddit. What put the Internet activist in hot water was his raid on JSTOR, a repository for academic journals, from which Swartz downloaded a significant number of articles. After he was arrested, his legal prosecution was excessive, even by the most conservative standards. Swartz was hit with more than a dozen felony charges that potentially carried with them more than 30 years in prison and $1 million in fines. Despite the zeal of prosecutors to single him out as a cautionary tale, their case ultimately failed. Sadly, Swartz turned down a plea bargain and two days later committed suicide. The book is a strange hybrid of biography, cultural journalism, and speculation that relies too heavily on legal documentation, hacker lore, and questionable conjecture based on close readings of blog posts made by Swartz. While he does present a detailed timeline of Swartz’s life and legacy, Peters’ analysis of the history and culture surrounding the book’s central thesis fails to find a solid point of view. Readers seeking a more nuanced portrait of Aaron Swartz might find more insightful commentary in the 2014 documentary The Internet’s Own Boy.
A hard look at Internet culture and the wunderkind it failed in the end.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6772-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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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