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
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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