An ambitious celebration of storytelling, with a warning about the delusions of AI and the deceits of social media.
Storytelling: “nature’s solution to the problem of being a highly social, highly intelligent species.”
“Anyone who thinks ‘emotions are what make us human’ has never been welcomed home by a dog.” So writes Ashton, author of How To Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery. But that dog isn’t going to tell you what it did while you were gone. What makes us human is our innate ability to put events into sequence, to develop characters and motivations, and to build suspense and reward attention. From campfire tales and cave art, through epics and portraiture, cuneiform tablets, Renaissance art, telegraphy and smartphones, narrative is everywhere. There is memorable storytelling here, too, for example, on the futuristic sterility of a Chinese silicon chip factory. “Anyone who enters the factory floor must first walk over sticky, fly-paper-like doormats, wrap themselves in an antistatic coverall made of conductive fibers, seal it with boots, a hood, a pair of goggles, and two pairs of gloves, and pass through a series of air locks, all to protect the factory and its product from the mortal dangers of dust. What lies beyond the air locks is a sterile alien world, bathed in yellow light, that seems as large as an ocean, with walls farther away than the eye can clearly see, almost empty of organic life.” Because the author is an innovator in technology, the payoff of the book lies with a note of caution in an age of digital storytelling: “The new storytelling technologies of our near future will conflate truth and lies and manifest falsehoods in ways beyond anything we have ever experienced….We must become more self-aware, engage in more self-reflection, and feel more doubt and humility than ever before.”
An ambitious celebration of storytelling, with a warning about the delusions of AI and the deceits of social media.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780063438699
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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