A revealing look at how the questions we ask speak to who we are.
Searching for answers.
Rogers, data editor at Google, is tasked with finding pattern, meaning, and trends in the billions of search queries that come through from all around the world. An immediate insight is that those searches are not just self-centered (though many are) but instead often look for solutions that help other beings, such as how one might calm a dog in a thunderstorm. “Search is part of our social world,” he writes. Humans are innately curious, Rogers adds, but though philosophers argue about whether we are innately altruistic, he takes hope in the fact that “the data strongly contradicts the idea that human beings are only interested in looking after themselves.” Natural disasters are a case in point, and while the top 20 all-time searches don’t provide much ammunition for his argument—they include “How to make pancakes” and “What dinosaur has 500 teeth”—searches are surging for such things, too, as how one says “I love you” in sign language and “How to cook for your dog” in plain English. Rogers examines seasonal variations: In January we ask how to quit drinking, in November, how to cook a turkey. He also looks at national differences that may speak volumes, such as the fact that Europeans search out science topics more than inhabitants of any other continent, with Belarus leading in astronomy and global warming taking second place in general science overall. It is encouraging that so many searches around the year are in the “how to help someone” vein, which leads Rogers to observe that “we are all a bit kinder, more generous and just a little bit more lost than we may have been led to believe.” Naturally, though, on how Google monetizes all those questions, Rogers is shtum.
A revealing look at how the questions we ask speak to who we are.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9798217176984
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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