A mostly obnoxious magazine column stretched to book length.
A former MTV news anchor and America’s Next Top Model contestant draws on her personal experience to generalize about the impact of the obsession with social media among those between the ages of 25 and 35.
Stolz presents dozens of exhibits of her rude behavior and anecdotes from friends who also exhaustively check Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tinder and Gchat. The author estimates that she spends 4.5 hours per day on her smartphone and admits she doesn't hold up her end of face-to-face or phone conversations due to the fact that she constantly checks other friends' tweets and status updates. "We hate ourselves for using these things so much,” she writes, “but we learn to live with the guilt….We can remember when we were focused and attentive, and it bothers us, but that doesn't mean we will stop.” She also writes that “I concluded that my smartphone had been filling a void, but then I realized that was the whole problem: these devices never filled a void because there had never been a void. They just came in and pushed other, real stuff out." However, readers should note that she’s not complaining. Stolz writes that she has amassed 1,462 Facebook friends, including 478 people she doesn't know at all, who are privy to her photos, status updates and whereabouts. In contrast, the author’s mother's standards for whom she considers friends online and in real life are the same: people she actually speaks to and genuinely likes. Stolz offers analyses and observations from sociologists, psychologists and clinicians who support her beliefs about social media addiction, and she glosses such topical jargon as "e-cheating," "iBrains" and "digitally-acquired ADD." Though the author admits that her obsession is absurd and harmful, she amply demonstrates that she isn't seriously inclined to stop.
A mostly obnoxious magazine column stretched to book length.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6178-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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