An occasionally hagiographic but mostly illuminating portrait in which Cook’s performance is viewed as impressive and...
A praise-filled yet also critical one-decade performance report on Apple CEO Tim Cook.
In the wake of Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, Cook’s job description seemed simple enough: Don’t try to fill Jobs’ larger-than-life shoes; just keep his vision alive while moving the Silicon Valley giant into the future on its self-perpetuating course. Naturally, the critics predicted—even desired—for the newly Cook-helmed kingdom to crumble. However, as Apple watcher Kahney (Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products, 2013, etc.) writes, “the critics were wrong. Fast forward eight years, and under Cook’s leadership, Apple has been killing it. Since Jobs died, Apple reached the ultimate milestone, becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar company….Cook’s Apple is crushing the competition in almost every way.” From a full examination of the 2016 San Bernardino fiasco, when Cook faced his greatest challenge—ultimately defying government coercion in defense of user privacy—to highly detailed before and after measures of diversity, inclusion, and environmental advances, Kahney’s book is no rags-to-riches, blow-by-blow timeline of Cook’s life. While that element is present, the volume is more a study in comparisons: Jobs was this way, here’s how Cook differs, and here are the sum effects of those differences. While Jobs cast his shadow as the innovative big-tech dynamo, Cook cuts quite the contrast as the reserved, privacy-loving believer in ethics, equality, and environment. As the author amply demonstrates, these core areas most neglected by Jobs are where Cook has been placing his biggest emphasis as he continues to evolve Apple’s corporate culture with his own stamp of personality. Calling Apple under Jobs a “Fortune 500 killing machine” in its aggressive arc to the top, Kahney stresses that “Apple under Cook is different….He is pushing Apple and the entire tech industry forward, creating an ethical transformation.”
An occasionally hagiographic but mostly illuminating portrait in which Cook’s performance is viewed as impressive and unprecedented.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53760-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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