A humane and practical reflection on the intersection of equity and technology.
An expert on providing services for aging and disabled people calls for a new era of technological equality in this debut book.
The regulations that cover disability and senior services, according to Myers-Brown, an executive at Vista Supports, were created for “a different mindset, and a different understanding of what care even means.” Indeed, some of the field’s most important regulations in the U.S., the Intermediate Care Facility for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities (ICF/IID) codes, are still built on a “core framework” that was written almost 40 years ago. The author aims to empower patients, families, care providers, and policymakers with a convincing case that emergent technologies can serve a pivotal role in the lives of disabled and elderly populations. The book is based on the guiding principle that tech “becomes liberation” when it’s “designed with humanity at the center,” and that it works best as a “partner” to human care by helping to restore people’s personal independence and to preserve their relationships with others. Too often, the author maintains, tech companies and caretakers forget that people don’t want to be managed, monitored, and supervised; they want to do things themselves. When technology doesn’t adequately consider the needs of disabled or aging users, Myers-Brown writes, it can violate what she calls the “Dean Martin Principle.” She describes a patient who soothed her anxiety by quietly repeating the words “Dean Martin,” and she imagines a generic AI-powered home assistant misinterpreting the phrase and blasting songs by the singer. The author offers her own AI-enabled virtual assistant as an alternative, trained for the needs of the aged and disabled; this platform can be further trained, she says, to support individual and cultural specificities.
Myers-Brown also includes memoiristic vignettes that make for an often poignant read. She writes, for example, of how she drew inspiration from her Black grandmother’s journey from segregated South Carolina to New York City (“South Carolina made her strong, and Harlem made her unstoppable”), and how her own religious faith guides her approach to technology. She also centers her experience as someone who’s worked in disability services her entire life and who used remote-service support processes long before they became mainstream. As president of the D.C. Coalition of Disability Service Providers, she not only grasps how the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) can apply to liberatory technology, but also writes expertly on the specifics of both federal and state law. Myers-Brown doesn’t shy away from the jargon and bureaucratic nuances of her field, but she consistently writes in an empathetic, accessible style. As a result, her book is a generally engaging read, although it’s punctuated by occasional references to the author’s own services, a plethora of trademarked phrases, and references to ancillary materials that aren’t included in the text, such as an accompanying workbook. This material makes the book feel, at times, like an extended sales pitch. Nevertheless, its underlying premise—that human-centered technology promises a “future where innovation doesn’t leave communities behind”—is a timely message for businesses, nonprofits, policy-shapers, and community activists as they enter a world that’s increasingly driven by AI.
A humane and practical reflection on the intersection of equity and technology.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9798994510339
Page Count: 267
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
