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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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