An edifying account of the potential of technology to address global problems.
Debut author and technology strategist Wang recounts her efforts to bring the mobile phone, and the opportunities it promises, to people in the least wealthy parts of the world.
In 2002, the author was traveling though the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. She was surprised to find strong mobile-phone network connectivity there, and she realized that her “assumptions about the digital revolution would need to be overhauled.” She left the world of investment banking and devoted herself to bringing mobile phones to some of the most remote and poverty-stricken communities in the hinterlands of Africa and South Asia. She discovered that the ownership of a mobile phone, which people in so much of the world take for granted, could be transformative for those living on the margins; it provided not only connectedness to family and friends, but also access to information, as well as health and financial services. Further, it specifically provided additional security to women, a lesson that Wang says was driven home most emphatically by what she calls “disproportionate burdens on women” caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The author thoughtfully chronicles her indefatigable efforts, which included working with Ashoka, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs seeking to address “some of the world’s biggest problems, like literacy, environmental issues, and maternal health,” as well as her work with global microfinance network Opportunity International. The resulting experience was one of what she terms exhauluration, a combination of exhilaration and exhaustion. Also, she astutely notes a cheerful aspect of technology: the manner in which it encourages communication and unity: “It bridges our humanity across miles of distance, culture, and economic circumstance.” Overall, Wang’s memoir is both informative and affecting, and it furnishes striking portraits of women she found “on the wrong side of the digital divide.”
An edifying account of the potential of technology to address global problems.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63299-482-0
Page Count: 243
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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