No Luddite diatribe, but an insightful tale of the digital dilemmas familiar to many families.
Weekend Australian Magazine columnist Maushart (What Women Want Now, 2007, etc.) examines what happened when she and her three teenaged children went on a six-month hiatus from the digital world.
The author includes a telling story about two little girls trapped in a storm drain. The first thing they did? “They updated their Facebook status, of course.” Maushart worried that she and her children were becoming trapped within the digital world, estranged from the real world and from each other. She had grown skeptical of the claim that the new media was somehow improving their lives. And so began “The Winter of Our Disconnect,” six months without computers (laptop and otherwise), iPods, iPhones, texting, video games, Facebook, e-mail or TV—a “screen-free adventure.” Though she and her children were initially excited about the adventure, resentment and resistance soon followed. Maushart hated having to write her newspaper column by hand; Sussy, the youngest, lamented that “I can’t go for walks ’cause I don’t have my iPod.” Over time, however, their self-imposed digital detox changed them for the better; boredom led to discovery of each other and of the world around them. The family room was no longer a series of separate docking stations, but a place where the family actually gathered. Family meals, and conversation, replaced hurried bites between digital fixes. Bill, freed from endless entrapment in video games, resurrected his love for music and excelled on the saxophone. Sussy discovered sleep, freed from the “need” to update her status at four in the morning. Rather than multitask, and aimlessly Google from one bit of information to the next, the kids read. They had discovered, as Maushart writes, “a renewed sense of agency.” The author narrates her story in a breezy, irreverent style, but beneath the humor is much wisdom about what our wired world does for us and to us.
No Luddite diatribe, but an insightful tale of the digital dilemmas familiar to many families.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58542-855-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A miscellany of paternal pride (and frustration) darkened by the author’s increasing realizations of his mortality.
Ruminations and reminiscences of an author—now in his 70s—about fatherhood, writing, and death.
O’Brien (July, July, 2002, etc.), who achieved considerable literary fame with both Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990), returns with an eclectic assembly of pieces that grow increasingly valedictory as the idea of mortality creeps in. (The title comes from the author’s uncertainty about his ability to assemble these pieces in a single volume.) He begins and ends with a letter: The initial one is to his first son (from 2003); the terminal one, to his two sons, both of whom are now teens (the present). Throughout the book, there are a number of recurring sections: “Home School” (lessons for his sons to accomplish), “The Magic Show” (about his long interest in magic), and “Pride” (about his feelings for his sons’ accomplishments). O’Brien also writes often about his own father. One literary figure emerges as almost a member of the family: Ernest Hemingway. The author loves Hemingway’s work (except when he doesn’t) and often gives his sons some of Papa’s most celebrated stories to read and think and write about. Near the end is a kind of stand-alone essay about Hemingway’s writings about war and death, which O’Brien realizes is Hemingway’s real subject. Other celebrated literary figures pop up in the text, including Elizabeth Bishop, Andrew Marvell, George Orwell, and Flannery O’Connor. Although O’Brien’s strong anti-war feelings are prominent throughout, his principal interest is fatherhood—specifically, at becoming a father later in his life and realizing that he will miss so much of his sons’ lives. He includes touching and amusing stories about his toddler sons, about the sadness he felt when his older son became a teen and began to distance himself, and about his anguish when his sons failed at something.
A miscellany of paternal pride (and frustration) darkened by the author’s increasing realizations of his mortality.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-618-03970-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
As much a work of philosophy as of physics and full of insights for readers willing to work hard.
Undeterred by a subject difficult to pin down, Italian theoretical physicist Rovelli (Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, 2017, etc.) explains his thoughts on time.
Other scientists have written primers on the concept of time for a general audience, but Rovelli, who also wrote the bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, adds his personal musings, which are astute and rewarding but do not make for an easy read. “We conventionally think of time,” he writes, “as something simple and fundamental that flows uniformly, independently from everything else, uniformly from the past to the future, measured by clocks and watches. In the course of time, the events of the universe succeed each other in an orderly way: pasts, presents, futures. The past is fixed, the future open….And yet all of this has turned out to be false.” Rovelli returns again and again to the ideas of three legendary men. Aristotle wrote that things change continually. What we call “time” is the measurement of that change. If nothing changed, time would not exist. Newton disagreed. While admitting the existence of a time that measures events, he insisted that there is an absolute “true time” that passes relentlessly. If the universe froze, time would roll on. To laymen, this may seem like common sense, but most philosophers are not convinced. Einstein asserted that both are right. Aristotle correctly explained that time flows in relation to something else. Educated laymen know that clocks register different times when they move or experience gravity. Newton’s absolute exists, but as a special case in Einstein’s curved space-time. According to Rovelli, our notion of time dissolves as our knowledge grows; complex features swell and then retreat and perhaps vanish entirely. Furthermore, equations describing many fundamental physical phenomena don’t require time.
As much a work of philosophy as of physics and full of insights for readers willing to work hard.Pub Date: May 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1610-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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