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 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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