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THE THIRD WAVE

AN ENTREPRENEUR'S VISION OF THE FUTURE

Opportunity beckons, and Case ably describes the possibilities, but the price of the chase may harm as well as benefit.

The founder of America Online outlines some of the potentialities he sees emerging in the “Internet of Everything.”

Case now invests in startups through his company, Revolution, but he also served as chairman of AOL-Time Warner and was the founding chair of President Barack Obama's Startup America Partnership. This veteran of the earliest generation of Internet architects—along with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, and others—still seems well-qualified to forecast what's ahead. He offers his own business history, primarily based in marketing and dealmaking (at both Procter & Gamble and Pizza Hut), as evidence that he knows the ropes. He identifies three sectors of economic activity as foci of the coming “Third Wave” of the Internet: health care, education, and food production, processing, and transportation. Each of these represents a partnership between government and the private sector aimed at achieving some public good. Case puts himself forward as a facilitator for future entrepreneurs to find their ways through the related labyrinths of political disputes and regulatory entanglement. “Successful engagement with government will be difficult, and it will take a willingness to listen, a foundation of respect, and a lot of patience,” he writes. “But it can work. It has worked. I know from experience.” Case’s vision of the future is compelling, but he may be overreaching when he emphasizes functions for third-party apps that could undermine professionally qualified expertise and challenge employment, earnings, and benefits. Case sees such apps being able to track the health care data of individuals. The danger is that they make use of previous public investment in the Internet to undermine existing regulatory structures and labor practices. New labor legislation will need to be overhauled, he writes, in order to make the envisioned changes possible.

Opportunity beckons, and Case ably describes the possibilities, but the price of the chase may harm as well as benefit.

Pub Date: April 5, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-3258-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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