Up-to-the-minute science meets the philosophy of identity in a poignant, engaging debut book.
A fascinating account of consumer genetic testing’s “fundamental reshaping of the American family” over the past two decades.
Swabbing your cheek and sending off for personal DNA results is increasingly common, for the curious as well as for family historians and those in the dark about their parentage. In her impeccably researched debut, journalist Copeland traces the development of “genetic genealogy,” a field created by citizen scientists. Whereas 1970s genealogists relied on microfilm archives and in-person interviews with relatives, their yearslong searches only shortened by lucky discoveries, today’s genetic “seekers” can get answers within days. In 2000, FamilyTreeDNA became the first company to offer at-home DNA testing, followed by Ancestry.com and 23andMe. The author chronicles her meeting with the founder of FamilyTreeDNA, her visit to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, and her correspondence with 400 DNA testers. Many received shocking results but agree it’s better to know the truth, even about abandonment, rape, or incest. Copeland highlights a few representative cases—e.g., a father who had a second family and a woman who didn’t learn she was adopted until age 51. Foundlings and children of sperm donors often meet (half-)siblings they never knew existed. But the anchoring storyline is that of Alice Collins Plebuch, who was surprised when her saliva sample indicated that she was half Eastern European Jewish instead of 100% British/Irish. Copeland presents her quest for her late father’s true heritage as a riveting mystery with as many false leads as any crime novel. Along the way, the author thoughtfully probes the ethical dangers of genetic testing, including conflicting privacy rights, an essentialist view of race, unexpected medical results, and DNA databases being used in crime-solving. As she notes, it’s a fast-moving field in need of regulation, and she engrossingly examines the many questions that arise, both practical and rhetorical: “What makes us who we are? Blood? Family? Culture?”
Up-to-the-minute science meets the philosophy of identity in a poignant, engaging debut book.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4300-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
The former president (Jankowski) and senior vice president (Fuchs) of CBS consider television's future and find the corporate networks in great shape despite cable TV's rise. The authors argue that the networks possess inherent strengths that will keep them powerful for many years to come. These include: tremendous concentrations of money, talent, and experience with long-established methods of creating popular entertainment; alliances with affiliates that pool news and other resources; and enormous audiences that will continue to lure advertisers. The virtues of the network concept explain Rupert Murdoch's recent success in building Fox and Ted Turner's attempted takeover of CBS, which occurred even as the media was sounding the networks' death knell. Meanwhile, a growing number of cable channels and emerging alternatives, though hobbled by a scarcity of money and talent, must fight for ever tinier slices of the viewer pie. This argument may be seen as self-serving, given the authors' backgrounds, and much of the rest of the book is little more than an apologia for TV. Sections on violence fail to consider important evidence of links between television and real-world violence. Other arguments- -that Americans want lowest common denominator entertainment, and that TV can't provide more balanced electoral coverage—also fail to persuade. But there's a strong dose of common sense in the authors' skepticism about the threat posed by cable and by developments like high-definition television, pay-per-view, and home shopping. The book also offers a solid overview of how networks function, of government regulation of TV, and of public television. Anyone betting heavily on the ``information superhighway'' should consider this bottom-line view. Take the rest with a grain of salt.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-507487-4
Page Count: 165
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Fans of Markoff, Levy, Lanier et al. will want to have a look at this intriguing portrait of coding and coders.
Of computer technology and its discontents.
Computers can do all kinds of cool things. The reason they can, writes tech journalist Thompson (Smarter than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, 2013), is that a coder has gotten to the problem. “Programmers spend their days trying to get computers to do new things,” he writes, “so they’re often very good at understanding the crazy what-ifs that computers make possible.” Some of those things, of course, have proven noxious: Facebook allows you to keep in touch with high school friends but at the expense of spying on your every online movement. Yet they’re kind of comprehensible, since they’re based on language: Coding problems are problems of words and thoughts and not numbers alone. Thompson looks at some of the stalwarts and heroes of the coding world, many of them not well-known—Ruchi Sanghvi, for example, who worked at Facebook and Dropbox before starting a sort of think tank “aimed at convincing members to pick a truly new, weird area to examine.” If you want weird these days, you get into artificial intelligence, of which the author has a qualified view. Humans may be displaced by machines, but the vaunted singularity probably won’t happen anytime soon. Probably. Thompson is an enthusiast and a learned scholar alike: He reckons that BASIC is one of the great inventions of history, being one of the ways “for teenagers to grasp, in such visceral and palpable ways, the fabric of infinity.” Though big tech is in the ascendant, he writes, there’s a growing number of young programmers who are attuned to the ethical issues surrounding what they do, demanding, for instance, that Microsoft not provide software to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Those coders, writes Thompson, are “the one group of people VCs and CEOs cannot afford to entirely ignore,” making them the heroes of the piece in more ways than one.
Fans of Markoff, Levy, Lanier et al. will want to have a look at this intriguing portrait of coding and coders.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2056-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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