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
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.
The acclaimed director displays his talents as a film critic.
Tarantino’s collection of essays about the important movies of his formative years is packed with everything needed for a powerful review: facts about the work, context about the creative decisions, and whether or not it was successful. The Oscar-winning director of classic films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs offers plenty of attitude with his thoughts on movies ranging from Animal House to Bullitt to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Big Chill. Whether you agree with his assessments or not, he provides the original reporting and insights only a veteran director would notice, and his engaging style makes it impossible to leave an essay without learning something. The concepts he smashes together in two sentences about Taxi Driver would take a semester of film theory class to unpack. Taxi Driver isn’t a “paraphrased remake” of The Searchers like Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? is a paraphrased remake of Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby or De Palma’s Dressed To Kill is a paraphrased remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But it’s about as close as you can get to a paraphrased remake without actually being one. Robert De Niro’s taxi driving protagonist Travis Bickle is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Like any good critic, Tarantino reveals bits of himself as he discusses the films that are important to him, recalling where he was when he first saw them and what the crowd was like. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author was raised by movie-loving parents who took him along to watch whatever they were watching, even if it included violent or sexual imagery. At the age of 8, he had seen the very adult MASH three times. Suddenly the dark humor of Kill Bill makes much more sense. With this collection, Tarantino offers well-researched love letters to his favorite movies of one of Hollywood’s most ambitious eras.
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-311258-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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