How to break up with your phone

Review by New York Times Review

HOW TO BREAK UP WITH YOUR PHONE By Catherine Price. (Ten Speed, paper, $12.99.) We're all addicted. That's not big news. But are there practical ways to unplug and, as Price puts it, "take back your life"? She has a plan, a 30-day plan, everything happens for a reason By Kate Bowler. (Random House, $26.) Bowler, a professor at Duke Divinity School, had a perspective-altering experience at 35 when she learned she had late-stage colon cancer. This is a memoir about her disillusionment with the "prosperity gospel," that American belief that to good people come only good things. She doesn't think this anymore, being wagner By Simon Callow. (Vintage, paper, $16.95.) Author of a monumental biography of Orson Welles, Callow now turns to an equally operatic subject: Richard Wagner, his life and times, building the great society By Joshua Zeitz. (Viking, $30.) The inner workings of the White House, with its war room intensity, never ceases to capture readers' attention. Zeitz delves here into Lyndon B. Johnson's administration, capturing both the atmosphere and the advisers (Bill Moyers and Jack Valenti, among others) who made Johnson's vision a reality, a literary tour de france By Robert Darnton. (Oxford, $34.95.) Darnton continues his decades-long exploration of how the publishing industry worked in France on the eve of the revolution. Using a trove of documents from a Swiss publisher that smuggled illegal works over the border, he is able to piece together a complex network that put subversive books in the hands of French men and women. "It is an intimate, often embarrassing thing to read over someone else's shoulder. (Anyone looking for a quick, effective mortification need only check the marginalia in his college paperbacks.) But certain books are wide and deep enough to deserve docents: George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' is, and Rebecca Mead, a staff writer at The New Yorker, whose my life in middlemarch I have been plunging through, is a sympathetic guide. 'Middlemarch' is both a boulder and a lodestar, a hulking, lengthy exploration of life's little delights and its disappointments - nominally as experienced by provincial burghers, but really, by us all. Mead weaves in bits of Eliot's own biography, appreciations of subsequent fans like Virginia Woolf and her own life story. In so doing, she brings what can seem remote in Eliot into the present, and touches on her profound achievement: the way she enters into but also remains above her characters, opening up for examination their innocent folly, their tragic hubris, their gentle goodness and their slippery selfregard." - MATTHEW SCHNEIER, STYLES REPORTER, ON WHAT HE'S READING.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Do you find yourself reaching for your phone first thing in the morning? All day long? Right before you go to sleep? You just might be addicted to it. Price has provided a manual for breaking addiction to your smartphone or any other wireless mobile device (jokingly, if slightly disturbingly, referred to as WMD). In the first part of the book, Price lays out the multiple ways this addiction can be harmful and result in anything from poor sleep to adult-onset ADHD. Probably most commonly, the devices commandeer our attention, keeping us from being present in the moment while also curtailing our productivity and creativity. The second half of the book is a 30-day guide to breaking up with your phone. Starting with downloading a usage-tracking app and ending with a 24-hour phast (phone fast), Price lays out a comprehensive, step-by-step solution to spending less time with your phone and more time doing the things you love. The style doesn't make for riveting reading, but as a self-help manual, this does the trick.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Library Journal Review

Science journalist Price (Vitamania) is not telling readers to throw away their smartphones. Instead, she is suggesting people stop and become conscious of how and why they use their devices, and to set boundaries between their time on- and offline. Early on, Price presents research on the effects smartphones have on relationships and mental and physical health. She then outlines a 30-day plan for using technology in a more beneficial manner, providing exercises and prompts, such as getting rid of junk apps, establishing no-phone zones, and developing their attention span. The result, assures Price, will be a fuller, more connected life. VERDICT Excellent, realistic advice for anyone wishing/needing to cut down on their screen time. © Copyright 2018. 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.

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Let's get something clear from the start: the point of this book is not to get you to throw your phone under a bus. Just as breaking up with a person doesn't mean that you're swearing off all human relationships, "breaking up" with your phone doesn't mean that you're trading in your touch screen for a rotary dial.  After all, there are lots of reasons for us to love our smartphones. They're cameras. They're DJs. They help us keep in touch with family and friends, and they know the answers to every piece of trivia we could ever think to ask. They tell us about the traffic and the weather; they store our calendars and our contact lists. Smartphones are amazing tools. But something about smartphones also makes us act like tools. Most of us find it hard to get through a meal or a movie or even a stoplight without pulling out our phones. On the rare occasions when we accidentally leave them at home or on our desk, we reach for them anyway, and feel anxious, again and again, each time we realize they're not there. If you're like most people, your phone is within arm's reach right this very second, and the mere mention of it is making you want to check something. Like the news. Or your texts. Or your email. Or the weather. Or, really, anything at all. Go ahead and do it. And then come back to this page and notice how you feel. Are you calm? Focused? Present? Satisfied? Or are you feeling a bit scattered and uneasy, vaguely stressed without really knowing why? Today, just over a decade since smartphones entered our lives, we're beginning to suspect that their impact on our lives might not be entirely good. We feel busy but ineffective. Connected but lonely. The same technology that gives us freedom can also act like a leash--and the more tethered we become, the more it raises the question of who's actually in control. The result is a paralyzing tension: we love our phones, but we often hate the way they make us feel. And no one seems to know what to do about it.  The problem isn't smartphones themselves. The problem is our relationships with them. Smartphones have infiltrated our lives so quickly and so thoroughly that we have never stopped to think about what we actually want our relationships with them to look like--or what effects these relationships might be having on our lives. We've never stopped to think about which features of our phones make us feel good, and which make us feel bad. We've never stopped to think about why smartphones are so hard to put down, or who might be benefiting when we pick them up. We've never stopped to think about what spending so many hours engaged with our devices might be doing to our brains, or whether a device billed as a way to connect us to other people might actually be driving us apart.  "Breaking up" with your phone means giving yourself a chance to stop and think.  It means noticing which parts of your relationship are working and which parts are not. It means setting boundaries between your online and offline lives. It means becoming conscious of how and why you use your phone--and recognizing that your phone is manipulating how and why you use it. It means undoing the effects that your phone has had on your brain. It means prioritizing real-life relationships over those that take place on screens. Breaking up with your phone means giving yourself the space, freedom, and tools necessary to create a new, long-term relationship, one that keeps what you love about your phone and gets rid of what you don't. A relationship, in other words, that makes you feel healthy and happy--and over which you have control. Excerpted from How to Break up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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