by Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2020
An unevenly presented but beneficial report sure to spark discussion about integrating kindness into modern technology.
How empathy can be cultivated amid an increasingly distracted, indifferent world.
In her persuasive debut, journalist and editor Phillips criticizes a culture rampantly prioritizing technology over real human connections, and she questions whether the two can exist synergistically. The tech world relies on detached communication while the roots of human-to-human connection require interactive participation, concern, and amity. To some, writes the author, technology has caused a steady decline in human empathy. Phillips agrees, citing a particularly vicious interaction on social media that was upsetting yet inspired her to delve into the subject matter headfirst. She chronicles her interviews with researchers, psychologists, and tech creators and users who impart their own perspectives, and she describes the efforts of a variety of tech-initiated solutions—e.g., Faciloscope and Google’s Perspective API, real-time online comment–moderating apps that systematically filter out toxic threads. Also contributing to the cause are virtual reality games like Enter the Room, which enables players to perceive the feelings of other participants, and software geared toward creating connections with kids on the autism spectrum. Phillips provides a helpful discussion of empathy-building training for corporate employees and medical professionals. The author isn’t just a journalist with an intense interest in this modern conundrum; she’s also “a millennial in my early thirties,” so her concerns about the importance of infusing caring and compassion into tech-saturated contemporary life are particularly relevant. However, while the author’s concentration holds steady on methods to enable technology to rescue modern-day empathy, a significant question lingers throughout: Can the tech world and its gadgets and gurus reverse the hard-hearted trend it actually induced? Phillips is optimistic as she covers a host of AI–based friendship and psychotherapy alternatives, but a finer focus and tighter narrative arc would have sharpened her message of encouraging and embracing the power of empathic technology.
An unevenly presented but beneficial report sure to spark discussion about integrating kindness into modern technology.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4184-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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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