An expansive and sobering history of the interplay of human data, conquest, and control.
From Neolithic times to the present day, a social scientist reveals how human recordkeeping became a powerful, sometimes coercive technology for shaping human lives.
Risam, an associate professor of digital humanities at Dartmouth College, explores how data evolved into a tool for conquest all over the world. From a social science perspective, human recordkeeping—neither natural nor neutral—became a technology of dominance, wielded to gain economic advantage, wage wars, oppress, and enslave. Predating written language, ancient practices of making marks, shaping clay tokens, or tying knots in rope to record crop yields or flood years helped manage uncertainty and plan for the future. Risam notes that by the late-17th century, data “became synonymous with fact, understood as objective and neutral, even though it was fashioned by human hands and never independent of the people who created it or the places where it was made.” Many examples of data abuse are deeply moving. At the Nuremberg trials, “the Hartheim Register, pulled from the office files at Hartheim Castle in 1945, tallied the number of disabled people gassed at euthanasia centers, including at the castle, and even calculated ‘savings’ in food worth more than 141 million Reichsmarks.” Risam observes, “The cumulative logic of the Reich’s meticulous records became the most damning witness at its own trial.” Finally, Risam briskly calls out present-day data manipulators, including Elon Musk’s DOGE: “The richest man on Earth, presiding over a platform with hundreds of millions of users and a satellite network routing communications around the globe, was standing in the White House, ruling with the president.” The author also critiques the impending impact of AI-amplified data and possible dystopian futures. The volume’s global scope and focus on documentation is fascinating—though many transformative technologies are unexamined, and the pace may leave some readers wishing they could linger.
An expansive and sobering history of the interplay of human data, conquest, and control.Pub Date: July 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780063430327
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
A rousing, suspenseful adventure tale.
A harrowing expedition to Antarctica, recounted by Departures senior features editor Sancton, who has reported from every continent on the planet.
On Aug. 16, 1897, the steam whaler Belgica set off from Belgium with young Adrien de Gerlache as commandant. Thus begins Sancton’s riveting history of exploration, ingenuity, and survival. The commandant’s inexperienced, often unruly crew, half non-Belgian, included scientists, a rookie engineer, and first mate Roald Amundsen, who would later become a celebrated polar explorer. After loading a half ton of explosive tonite, the ship set sail with 23 crew members and two cats. In Rio de Janeiro, they were joined by Dr. Frederick Cook, a young, shameless huckster who had accompanied Robert Peary as a surgeon and ethnologist on an expedition to northern Greenland. In Punta Arenas, four seamen were removed for insubordination, and rats snuck onboard. In Tierra del Fuego, the ship ran aground for a while. Sancton evokes a calm anxiety as he chronicles the ship’s journey south. On Jan. 19, 1898, near the South Shetland Islands, the crew spotted the first icebergs. Rough waves swept someone overboard. Days later, they saw Antarctica in the distance. Glory was “finally within reach.” The author describes the discovery and naming of new lands and the work of the scientists gathering specimens. The ship continued through a perilous, ice-littered sea, as the commandant was anxious to reach a record-setting latitude. On March 6, the Belgica became icebound. The crew did everything they could to prepare for a dark, below-freezing winter, but they were wracked with despair, suffering headaches, insomnia, dizziness, and later, madness—all vividly capture by Sancton. The sun returned on July 22, and by March 1899, they were able to escape the ice. With a cast of intriguing characters and drama galore, this history reads like fiction and will thrill fans of Endurance and In the Kingdom of Ice.
A rousing, suspenseful adventure tale.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984824-33-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A valuable contribution to our understanding of one of history’s most vital figures.
An epistolary memoir of Nelson Mandela’s prison years.
From August 1962 to February 1990, Mandela (1918-2013) was imprisoned by the apartheid state of South Africa. During his more than 27 years in prison, the bulk of which he served on the notorious Robben Island prison off the shores of Cape Town, he wrote thousands of letters to family and friends, lawyers and fellow African National Congress members, prison officials, and members of the government. Heavily censored for both content and length, letters from Robben Island and South Africa’s other political prisons did not always reach their intended targets; when they did, the censorship could make them virtually unintelligible. To assemble this vitally important collection, Venter (A Free Mind: Ahmed Kathrada's Notebook from Robben Island, 2006, etc.), a longtime Johannesburg-based editor and journalist, pored through these letters in various public and private archives across South Africa and beyond as well as Mandela’s own notebooks, in which he transcribed versions of these letters. The result is a necessary, intimate portrait of the great leader. The man who emerges is warm and intelligent and a savvy, persuasive, and strategic thinker. During his life, Mandela was a loving husband and father, a devotee of the ANC’s struggle, and capable of interacting with prominent statesmen and the ANC’s rank and file. He was not above flattery or hard-nosed steeliness toward his captors as suited his needs, and he was always yearning for freedom, not only—or even primarily—for himself, but rather for his people, a goal that is the constant theme of this collection and was the consuming vision of his entire time as a prisoner. Venter adds tremendous value with his annotations and introductions to the work as a whole and to the book’s various sections.
A valuable contribution to our understanding of one of history’s most vital figures.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63149-117-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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