Not without flaws but an informative and inspiring book.
A video game developer tells how she became an outspoken advocate for victims of online abuse.
In August 2014, the life Quinn had built after “clawing my way out of poverty, homelessness, isolation, and mental illness” changed forever. An abusive ex-lover had decided to take revenge by posting hateful messages about her on video game forums. One post included a link to a 9,000-word “manifesto” that claimed Quinn had slept with video game evaluators to receive favorable reviews. A few months later, she found herself at the center of a cultural storm that came to be known as GamerGate. Hackers sympathetic to her ex hounded Quinn's past associates. Online, they posted nude photos and “discussions about how to drive me to suicide and the merits of raping me versus torturing me first and raping me afterwards.” The author began keeping her whereabouts secret because she felt as unsafe in her virtual life as she did in her real one. Refusing to be cowed into silence, she attempted to seek justice only to find that the “legal system [was] ill-equipped to handle the idea that anything real happens on the internet. In response, she founded an online abuse crisis hotline and victims’ advocacy group, which she named Crash Override Network. Quinn’s book is strongest in the detailed information she provides about the many—mostly underdiscussed—legal and corporate bottlenecks she encountered as both a victim and investigator of malicious cyberattacks. One especially disturbing observation she makes is that typical victims come from sexually and racially marginalized groups that law enforcement “[has] a history of mistreating.” Her story, which mingles details from her personal and professional lives along with hard-won tips for online safety, sometimes comes across as scattered. Nevertheless, the narrative is still a worthwhile read for anyone interested in taking action against the realities—and devastating effects—of extreme internet trolling.
Not without flaws but an informative and inspiring book.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-808-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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