Linn’s examination of how screens have taken over childhood is a must-read for any parent.
An eye-opening and disturbing exploration of how marketing tech to children is creating a passive, dysfunctional generation.
In 2004, Linn, a psychologist specializing in childhood development, published Consuming Kids, a landmark study on how corporations develop marketing campaigns specifically aimed at young people. In the ensuing years, there has been a seismic shift in technology, with a flood of smartphones, tablets, and interactive apps, and children are connecting to the online world at younger ages. Some companies are even marketing screen-based games for babies. Lego, once seen as a toy that encouraged creativity and innovation, now comes with apps that direct what the child should do, and stuffed toys can now sing, dance, walk, or talk at the push of a button. “The more a toy can do, the less a child needs to do,” writes the author. “And the less a child does with a toy, the less useful that child’s play is to healthy development.” One of the book’s hardest-hitting chapters examines “pester power,” encouraged by marketers in order to place an emphasis on brands, which allows for the sale not just of individual toys, but entire product lines. Brand addiction is a sure path to profitability. The nadir of cynicism is when researchers profile teens to determine their psychological weaknesses so they can target advertising at them. Linn recounts numerous horror stories about manipulation, but she is proactive in her advice. “Postpone getting your child a smartphone until at least eighth grade,” she writes. “When it comes to raising children, smartphones are probably the most pernicious of all tech devices.” Read books with them, or go outside to play. Put down your own devices so you do not set a bad example. Set limits on screen time, and don’t yield to nagging for more stuff. In other words, be an active and involved parent.
Linn’s examination of how screens have taken over childhood is a must-read for any parent.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62097-227-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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