by Peter H. Diamandis Steven Kotler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 2020
Welcome reading for the futurists and technogeeks in the audience.
An enthusiastic look at the technologies of the future—which is just about now.
Where are the flying cars we were promised as kids? The answer is, right around the corner. “The cars are here,” write Diamandis and Kotler (Bold: How To Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, 2015, etc.). They may be here, but the problem is how to scale them so they can be introduced into the market economically—and how to scale them, physically, to carry human loads. Uber is slated to unveil a flying car in 2020 and has set a target of 2023 for operational ride-sharing in Los Angeles and Dallas. The game-changer, though, is to make the cost of taking such a ride cheaper than owning a car, one example of many instances of “disruptive innovation” and convergence that isn’t just cool, but that also shifts the order of how we do things. Flying cars will disrupt the automobile industry in more than one way, since they’ll not just fly, but also use “distributed electric propulsion,” controlling multiple electric motors by means of a computer. Elon Musk’s Hyperloop train, similarly, is meant to revolutionize long-distance travel by means of a train that will move faster than commercial aircraft. If such innovations seem unlikely, the authors survey the development of artificial intelligence. Only a generation ago, AI couldn’t do much more than “read zip codes off letters,” but now it can now read nearly a quarter-million books in a second to provide an answer to just about any question a human might have—apart from the meaning of life and other such philosophical matters. Diamandis and Kotler are cheerleaders for disruption, the scale and speed of which are increasing. But they’re also realists, noting where there’s more sizzle than steak even when they promise really cool things, like overcoming such problems as “mitochondrial dysfunction” to extend human life.
Welcome reading for the futurists and technogeeks in the audience.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0966-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Share your opinion of this book
by Bari Weiss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Share your opinion of this book
by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
Share your opinion of this book
More by Bob Woodward
BOOK REVIEW
by Bob Woodward & Robert Costa
BOOK REVIEW
by Bob Woodward
BOOK REVIEW
by Bob Woodward
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.