Rosenberg suggests that blogging’s “outpouring of human expression” should “delight us.” This fair and fascinating account...
Salon co-founder Rosenberg (Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, 2007) offers an elegantly accessible history and defense of a now-ubiquitous Internet phenomenon—the blogosphere.
In 2003 there were 100,000 blogs worldwide; today there are approximately 184 million. Such phenomenal growth of blogging, which the author defines as “a hybrid of traditional publishing and casual electronic messaging,” was initially due to adventurous, and at times decidedly odd, men and women who both saw the potential in the totally free expression blogging allows and developed the software that made it simple and easy. Rosenberg energetically chronicles these ’90s pioneers, including Justin Hall, who obsessively posted a real-time archive of his life in the early ’90s; Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan, who developed a simple program—subsequently sold to Google—that made blogging accessible to anyone (Williams would later develop Twitter); Robert Scoble and others, who showed, for better or worse, that blogging could be profitable; and Josh Marshall, who made blogging a true journalistic endeavor. As more people have discovered the joys of blogging, what has been created, Rosenberg claims, is nothing less than “a new kind of public sphere, at once ephemeral and timeless, sharing the characteristics of conversation and deliberation.” Blogging allows for new possibilities in form and content and the blossoming of new talent; it’s also fun. Yet Rosenberg also acknowledges the critiques of such an unbridled flood of verbiage. With patient detail—and for the most part jargon-free language—he addresses the concern that the blogosphere is nothing more than a mindless morass of trivia—that it may be creating an “echo chamber effect” where we talk to only those who agree with us, and may lead to cultural disintegration as millions of monologues replace a common discourse. Though he never dismisses them out of hand, the author concludes that these complaints are mostly baseless or overwrought.
Rosenberg suggests that blogging’s “outpouring of human expression” should “delight us.” This fair and fascinating account should delight as well.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-45136-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Dramatic, immersive, and wanting—much like desire itself.
Based on eight years of reporting and thousands of hours of interaction, a journalist chronicles the inner worlds of three women’s erotic desires.
In her dramatic debut about “what longing in America looks like,” Taddeo, who has contributed to Esquire, Elle, and other publications, follows the sex lives of three American women. On the surface, each woman’s story could be a soap opera. There’s Maggie, a teenager engaged in a secret relationship with her high school teacher; Lina, a housewife consumed by a torrid affair with an old flame; and Sloane, a wealthy restaurateur encouraged by her husband to sleep with other people while he watches. Instead of sensationalizing, the author illuminates Maggie’s, Lina’s, and Sloane’s erotic experiences in the context of their human complexities and personal histories, revealing deeper wounds and emotional yearnings. Lina’s infidelity was driven by a decade of her husband’s romantic and sexual refusal despite marriage counseling and Lina's pleading. Sloane’s Fifty Shades of Grey–like lifestyle seems far less exotic when readers learn that she has felt pressured to perform for her husband's pleasure. Taddeo’s coverage is at its most nuanced when she chronicles Maggie’s decision to go to the authorities a few years after her traumatic tryst. Recounting the subsequent trial against Maggie’s abuser, the author honors the triumph of Maggie’s courageous vulnerability as well as the devastating ramifications of her community’s disbelief. Unfortunately, this book on “female desire” conspicuously omits any meaningful discussion of social identities beyond gender and class; only in the epilogue does Taddeo mention race and its impacts on women's experiences with sex and longing. Such oversight brings a palpable white gaze to the narrative. Compounded by the author’s occasionally lackluster prose, the book’s flaws compete with its meaningful contribution to #MeToo–era reporting.
Dramatic, immersive, and wanting—much like desire itself.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4229-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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