Although Andrew Keen has long been involved with Silicon Valley, he has a big problem with the sunny predictions made by early champions of the Internet. And here he is on solid ground. The web did not level the political playing field, provide nearly as many jobs as it destroyed, turn every citizen into an entrepreneur or allow us to share the Internet’s bounty of conveniences without sacrificing our privacy in the process.

Keen concedes that only so many sins can be laid at the Internet’s feet, but he does indict it for an array of evils, ranging from encouraging copyright piracy to concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. He describes how digital photography reduced Kodak to ruins and how the digital copying of music toppled his beloved record stores along London’s “Golden Mile of Vinyl.”

But there’s a distinction to be made—and one Keen too often ignores—between the capabilities a new technology offers and the uses to which those capabilities are put. After all, one can hardly blame the invention of the telescope for a proliferation of Peeping Toms. Nor is there anything intrinsically sinister about new technologies rendering old ones obsolete. All technologies are transitional, and at each stage of inventive evolution there are human casualties, jobs lost and communities torn asunder. This is a major reason governments exist—to help absorb the shock of such dislocation.

That’s pretty much the solution Keen ultimately arrives at. “The answer,” he says, “is to use the law and regulation to force the Internet out of its prolonged adolescence.” Technology, after all, controls process, not its own context.

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When we think about technology and innovation, the names that come to mind immediately are Bill Gates and Steve Jobs—maybe Steve Wozniak or Paul Allen for the more hard-core geeks among us.

But in this fascinating look at the digital revolution, Walter Isaacson reveals just how many brilliant minds it took to bring us our current life of iPads and Facebook. As in his seminal biographies of Jobs, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson deftly profiles those throughout history who could marry art and science to advance technology.

The Innovators starts not in 1980s Seattle or in Silicon Valley.  It starts in 1830s England with Ada Byron, the daughter of Lord Byron. More commonly known as Ada, Countess of Lovelace, Isaacson dubs this member of the nobility “an iconic figure in the history of computing,” who with her colleagues envisioned a machine that could “store, manipulate, process and act upon anything that could be expressed in symbols.” She was a woman far, far ahead of her time, one who understood that technology would be nothing without human creativity.

It’s a surprising and beguiling start to a book that mixes biographical sketches of key innovators with in-depth—occasionally dense for the non-techies among us—descriptions of decisive moments in technology. What emerges as most striking is how rarely true eureka moments happened alone: Allen and Gates writing code as Lakeside High School students. Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn creating the beautifully simple early video game Pong. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, creators of Google, whose collaboration Isaacson likens to “two swords sharpening each other.”

The Innovators brings a fresh eye to the depths of human potential, even as he reminds us that technological innovation is an incredibly slow process. As Isaacson writes, “The digital age may seem revolutionary, but it was based on expanding the ideas handed down from previous generations.”

After closing New York Times reporter Matt Richtel’s compelling book A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention, I couldn’t help but think of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Both chronicle the story of a crime. If you’ve ever read In Cold Blood, you know how the story builds with palpable suspense. The same is true here. The crime, though, isn’t coldblooded murder, but something seemingly more mundane: a car accident on a hillside in Utah that killed two rocket scientists and was caused by a careless teenager. The alleged crime is negligent homicide, because the teenager, Reggie, may have been texting just before the crash.

The accident occurred in 2006, when there was no state law against texting and driving. And in the immediate aftermath of the crash, Reggie vehemently denies being on his phone. But soon law enforcement officers aren’t so sure they believe him. What follows is a detailed reporting of the ensuing legal battle—and the effects it has on the key players on both sides.

Along the way, Richtel makes a sinister suggestion: This accident could have happened to anyone. By meeting with neuroscientists who study the science of distraction, Richtel provides a powerful backdrop that explains the significance of Reggie’s accident. It is important not only for the people involved and the driving laws in Utah, but also for all of us out in the everyday world with our phones, those tiny devices constantly demanding attention. When does wandering attention cross the line? When do each of us become, against our better judgment, dangerous?

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

I read The End of Absence with interest, because I am a member of what author Michael Harris calls the “Straddle Generation,” the generation born before 1985, the last one to remember adult life before the Internet. Harris compares this moment in history to the advent of the Gutenberg press in the 15th century, when the written word became universally available. “Young and old,” he writes, “we’re all straddling two realities to a certain degree. In our rush toward the promise of Google and Facebook—toward the promise of reduced ignorance and reduced loneliness—we feel certain we are rushing toward a better life. We forget the myriad accommodations we made along the way.” Through constant connectivity, he argues, we have lost our “daydreaming silences,” giving up times of solitude and wonder.

Harris’ book is a sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing look at the relationships we have with the technology in our lives, as well as the human beings we know and love and increasingly view through the lens of our various technologies. As he points out, “When we don’t want to be alone and yet don’t want the hassle that fellow humans represent either, the digital filter is an ideal compromise.”

What’s more disturbing, Harris argues, is that we are allowing ourselves to be reshaped unconsciously, even biologically, sacrificing the ability to be completely absorbed by a story, keenly aware of life’s smallest details or attuned to silence.

On a hopeful note, Harris offers his own attempts to regain the gift of absence as a roadmap for those of us who want it back.

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Grab your tickets and climb aboard Train, Tom Zoellner's full-steam-ahead, rollicking express ride on the great trains of the world. Part memoir and part history of the railroads in several countries, Zoellner's chronicle of days and nights spent crammed in crowded coaches or sleeper cars, chatting with crossing guards at remote outposts in India, or marveling at the engineering of formerly grand stations now in disrepair recalls both the romance and the risk of riding the rails.

Recollections of a tearful young girl lost in a book he glimpsed on a train ride on a snowy Pennsylvania night some 20 years ago prompt Zoellner to recall that the railroads "summon forth a vision of past sweetness, a lost national togetherness." Throwing his belongings in a backpack and punching his tickets, he hops several trains for a close-up look at the marvel and the possibilities of the rails. He boards trains across the world, starting in Britain—where he rides from the northern shores of Scotland to a spot in the southwest near Cornwall called Land's End—and moving on through India, Russia—where he rides the famed Trans-Siberian Railway—China, Peru and Spain. Along the way, he chats with passengers, yearning for a glimpse of the ways that trains have formed and continue to influence their lives.

Although the sound of a faraway train whistle often stirs nostalgic longings, Zoellner reminds us that railroads were built on the backbones of many laborers who lost their lives in the effort to stretch gleaming tracks across a nation. In India, for example, the "Bhor Ghats became the deadliest stretch of railway construction in Asia where . . . the death rate was close to one-third due to gunpowder blasts, falls from cliffs, and cholera."

In the United States, millions ride commuter trains every morning, but Zoellner points out that, according to an Amtrak study, 98 percent of Americans have never taken a passenger train to travel to their destinations. Zoellner sits in on a rail conference in which politicians and others discuss the future of rail travel, especially high-speed rail travel in California, and while the participants bicker about policy, they nevertheless recognize the potential of the rails.

Zoellner keeps his narrative firmly on the rails in this absorbing round-the-world journey.

Douglas Edwards was “employee number 59,” the director of consumer marketing and brand management at Google from 1999 to 2005. In I’m Feeling Lucky,Edwards gives readers a behind-the-behemoth look at the then-“young” search giant and the absorbing personalities of those who worked there. Although he includes a glossary, you don’t need a technical background or a fluency in geek-speak to find this book fun and fascinating.

Edwards is a straightforward writer, explaining things as he goes. For example, he tells us founding members Larry Page and Sergey Brin chose the name “Google” in part because it “played to their sense of math and scale. . . . Google is a play on ‘googol,’ which is the number one followed by a hundred zeroes.” Even if you’re not an Internet whiz, Edwards writes, “At least you know what Google does. It finds stuff on the Internet.” When he was a Noogler (new hire), he admits, “I didn’t know what a web indexer, a pageranker, or a spidering robot was. I didn’t know how dogmatic engineers could be. I didn’t know how many Internet executives could squeeze into a hot tub or how it felt to ‘earn’ more in one day than I had in 30 years of hard work . . . but I do now.”

I’m Feeling Lucky is an insider’s view of the “Google Experience,” from its famously nonhierarchical corporate structure to the bricks and mortar of the Googleplex itself. Edwards makes clear that his book is not, however, a full history of the company, nor does he delve into current concerns or controversies. “I include only what happened between my first day in 1999 and the day I left in 2005,” he explains. “We weren’t yet worried about network neutrality, street-view data gathering, or off-shore wind farms.” His days were the days when the big issues were “develop the best search technology, sell lots of ads, avoid getting killed by Microsoft.” But what days they were! Prepare for (to quote some chapter titles) “A World Without Form,” where you may encounter “Managers in Hot Tubs and in Hot Water,” or “Rugged Individuals with a Taste for Porn,” where “Mistakes Were Made” but there’s “Real Integrity and Thoughts about God,” too. All in all, I’m Feeling Lucky is an insightful and illuminating peek behind the curtain of Google’s early days.