A powerful case against Google that deserves readers’ attention.
In this political book, a former insider at Google claims that the company attempted to control the information available to its users.
In response to Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, Google’s top executives marshaled a battle strategy to oppose his political plans, contends Vorhies, a senior engineer at the colossal company for more than eight years. According to the author, “The election of Donald Trump was a PROBLEM, which needed a SOLUTION.” Vorhies asserts that the solution was a program called Machine Learning Fairness, an artificial intelligence product designed to be a “new system of information control” that was nominally touted as a way to correct the “unconscious bias” of its users, but more ambitiously aimed to “redefine reality.” The ultimate goal, the author contends, was a dystopian attempt to bury narratives that didn’t support a left-leaning political agenda, a kind of far-reaching program of civic brainwashing. In strong language, Vorhies records his astonishment: “Oh my, God, communism is coming to the United States and it’s going to be brought by Google.” The author eventually resigned from his position as a matter of conscience and, with the assistance of Project Veritas, became a whistleblower. Vorhies’ account is substantiated by an impressive storehouse of evidence—he left Google with hundreds of pages from its internal servers documenting its political commitments as well as its project to combat “algorithmic unfairness.” His position is lucidly conveyed, accessible even to those with a minimum of technological sophistication. But his claims about Google are ensconced in a rambling and sometimes self-aggrandizing autobiography as well as in his complaints about how exhausted he was by “leftists who’d won every single battle in the culture wars for the past thirty years.” Still, his accusations against Google are gravely important, and worth readers’ wading through the meandering parts of his book—written with Heckenlively—to get to them.
A powerful case against Google that deserves readers’ attention.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-51-076736-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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