Review by New York Times Review
THE HOUSE OF GOVERNMENT: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine. (Princeton University, $39.95.) This panoramic history describes the tragic lives of Bolshevik revolutionaries who were swallowed up by the cause they believed in. The story is as intricate as any Russian novel. THE UNWOMANLY FACE OF WAR: An Oral History of Women in World War II, by Svetlana Alexievich. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. (Random House, $30.) This oral history, one of a series that won Alexievich the literature Nobel in 2015, charts World War II as seen by the Russian women who experienced it and disproves the assumption that war is "unwomanly." A LIFE OF ADVENTURE AND DELIGHT: Stories, by Akhil Sharma. (Norton, $24.95.) In eight haunting, revelatory stories about Indian characters, both in Delhi and in metropolitan New York, this collection offers a cultural exposé and a lacerating critique of a certain type of male ego. FREUD: The Making of an Illusion, by Frederick Crews. (Metropolitan/Holt, $40.) Crews's cohesive but slanted account presents, for the first time in a single volume, a portrait of Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester and all-around nasty nut job. THE SEVENTH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE, by Laurent Binet. Translated by Sam Taylor. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Binet's playful detective novel reimagines the historical event of the literary theorist Roland Barthes's death. It's a burlesque set in a time when literary theory was at its cultural zenith; knowing, antic, amusingly disrespectful and increasingly zany. TO SIRI WITH LOVE: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines, by Judith Newman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) Newman's tender, boisterous memoir strips the usual zone of privacy to edge into the world her autistic son occupies. In freely speaking her mind, Newman raises provocative questions about the intersection of autism and the neurotypical. IMPOSSIBLE VIEWS OF THE WORLD, by Lucy Ives. (Penguin Press, $25.) In this dark and funny first novel about a mystery in a museum, a young woman stuck in an entry-level job as her private life unravels waits for the baby boomers to pass from the scene. LIFE IN CODE: A Personal History of Technology, by Ellen Ullman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A pioneering programmer discusses her career and the dangers the internet poses to privacy and civility. THE DESTROYERS, by Christopher Bollen. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) The heir to a construction empire goes missing on the Greek island of Patmos in Bollen's third novel, a seductive and richly atmospheric literary thriller in which wealth and luxury are inherent, but also inherently unstable. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Entering the predominantly male profession of computer programming, Ullman armed herself with the understanding that I was not afraid of machines, and an honors thesis onMacbeth. As a woman in a field dominated by arrogant, young, white males, she withstood many insults and humiliations. Self-taught, she wrote code and learned to admire the elegance of well-written code. In the 20 years since her groundbreaking memoir, Close to the Machine, she has continued to write, including two novels and the essays gathered here, which span the last 25 years. Ullman chronicles tech developments, Y2K, the early promise and fears associated with the burgeoning Internet, and the boom, crash, and boom of tech stocks and start-up culture. Throughout it all, Ullman maintains a healthy skepticism regarding the notion that technology will cure all that ails us. In the section on intelligent machines and artificial intelligence, for example, she brilliantly questions the computer's capacity for sentience. The error in robotics, she writes, is mistaking the tool for its builder. Ullman also astutely observes, robots aren't becoming us, I feared; we are becoming them. --Segedin, Ben Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist and former computer programmer Ullman returns to the domain of her seminal memoir, Close to the Machine (1997), an unflinching insider's account of the digital revolution, with this equally eloquent collection of previously published essays from the past 20 years. Providing much-needed nuance to the binary world of code, the essays gracefully move between intimate anecdotes, frustrated rants about the unconscious bias and hypercompetitiveness that dominate much of venture-capitalist startup culture, philosophical meanderings about artificial intelligence and the nature of human thought, and big-picture analysis about the relationship between technical design and human desire. Not only is Ullman an astute observer of the changing culture but she proves prescient on a diverse range of issues including the siloing effect of the internet, the growing digital divide, and corporate-assisted government surveillance. Neither technophilic nor technophobic, this collection creates a time-lapse view of the rapid development of technology in recent years and provides general readers with much-needed grounding for the sweeping changes of the revolution underway. It's also simply a pleasure to read. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This well-written memoir, actually a collection of essays penned over roughly 25 years, presents an insider's view of the computer/Internet revolution. Programmer and software engineer Ullman (Close to the Machine) offers a female perspective on a field in which women are greatly underrepresented and frequently made to feel unwelcome. She uses her own experiences to illustrate how programming has evolved, how new programs are piggybacked onto existing ones, and how difficult that makes debugging. Ullman also covers the Y2K scare and its resolution, the monetization of applications, the impact of the smartphone, and the challenge of producing artificial intelligence. The book is at its best when the author addresses her personal history, sexuality, and social consciousness. She describes the role that the Internet has played in distorting social and political institutions (for instance, through the promulgation of fake news and the election of Donald Trump) and shares her misgivings about her part in advancing the new technology. In addition, Ullman is dismayed at how the arrival of tech companies such as Twitter and Yelp has affected her San Francisco neighborhood-particularly its residents' loss of idealism and innocence. Verdict Recommended for those who have worked in the tech fields or are interested in doing so and anyone intrigued by technology and its implications.-Harold D. Shane, Mathematics Emeritus, Baruch Coll. Lib., CUNY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sharply written, politically charged memoir of life in the data trenches by computer pioneer Ullman (By Blood, 2012, etc.)."I once had a job where I didn't talk to anyone for two years," writes the author, who is known in computing circles for many things, not least her work on the graphical forerunner to Windows. As Ullman notes, programmers live in "mind-time" and not the ordinary time-space continuum the rest of us inhabit, and in any event they're poorly socialized; one early boss had intended to hire her simply to inflict a woman on an underling ("evidently, Peterson was some manager he wished ill, and I was the ill"), then was demoted to the underling's position and grudgingly had to supervise her himself. Early on, by her account, Ullman brought ethical considerations to bear on her work, reminding teammates on a project that veered into epidemiology that the best solution was not the Nazi one of killing off carriers of a particular disease, which earned her the sneer of a male colleague: "This is how I know you're not a real techie." More than a personal account, Ullman's narrative is a you-are-here chronicle of the evolution of things we take for granted, from the early AI research of the 1970s and the first flickerings of the personal computer to the founding of Googleand now, to a decidedly dystopian present that is the real thrust of a sometimes-rueful confession. As Ullman writes without hyperbole, all the liberatory promise of the personal computer has been swallowed up by corporations. Corporate leaders may promise that they're changing the world, but that proclamation is "but an advertisement, a branding that obscures the little devil, disruption, that hides within the mantra" and threatens to destroy what little civilization we have left. What Anthony Bourdain did for chefs, Ullman does for computer geeks. A fine rejoinder and update to Doug Coupland's Microserfs and of great interest to any computer user. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
