A straightforward, useful but sometimes uneven guide to the basics of working with AI.
A debut primer on artificial intelligence targets nonspecialists.
Sharman’s slim guide joins an endless ocean of books intended to explain, demystify, or even domesticate the large language models and AI tools that are surging in popularity and ubiquity in seemingly every corner of society. The author, a longtime programmer and web designer, has been working with the precursors of AI for decades—and he admits immediately that he employed AI to help write this manual. “The book’s clarity comes from my programmer’s mindset,” he asserts. “Give AI clear instructions, and it becomes your partner, not a puzzle.” Oddly, on the very next page, the author refers to himself in the third person: “I wrote this book with the help of AI but its clarity and usefulness come from the vision of its author, Roland Sharman.” More importantly, the text points out that this guide isn’t about spotlight-grabbing entities like ChatGPT; every time readers use spellcheck, email sorting, or Netflix suggestions, they’re employing AI. The work provides dozens of clear, bullet-pointed tips for getting the most out of these and other iterations like chatbots, translation apps, and image generators (“Do not share private info: When using chatbots, avoid typing your full name, address, or password. Stick to fun questions or general topics”). The book also delivers intriguing success stories about people who have embraced free AI tools (“Carlos runs a food truck and wanted a fun logo but couldn’t afford a designer. He used Crayon to create images by typing ‘taco truck with bright colours.’ He picked his favourite design, tweaked it a bit, and now it is on his truck, drawing in customers daily”). The sense that AI has written part of the text is omnipresent in many of the pages. But regardless of the provenance, the guide offers too many cheerleading slogans (“Your imagination plus AI is unstoppable, and there’s more to create!”), distracting from the practical programmer’s advice dispensed throughout the book. That counsel—about clarifying input language and choosing prompts with care and specificity—is certainly helpful.
A straightforward, useful but sometimes uneven guide to the basics of working with AI.Pub Date: July 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798291010129
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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