Publishers Weekly
01/13/2020
Axelrod (The Point of Vanishing), director of Loyola’s creative writing program, provides powerful arguments against today’s all-encompassing digital world in this concise and insightful meditation. After being blinded in one eye while playing basketball, Axelrod, then a college junior, was forced to adjust to the loss of peripheral vision and depth perception, leading him to a more general, lifelong interest in the factors shaping his view of the world. This search acquired new urgency after the 2016 presidential election led him to conclude that people, dependent on their digital devices, have become “lost in a new way, disoriented in our very disorientation.” To illustrate the benefits of drawing on one’s own memory and observation skills, he discusses the cognitive benefits of navigating without recourse to GPS, citing findings that London cab drivers, famous for their in-depth geographic knowledge, had larger than usual hippocampi. Other benefits of unplugging he discusses include the ability to wander and thus make unexpected discoveries, immersing oneself in an activity and entering what psychologists term “the flow state,” and cultivating a sense of curiosity and patience. While Axelrod’s basic message is familiar, his impassioned plea for a less smartphone-centric existence should resonate with many. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
The Stars in Our Pockets isn’t really a memoir or a polemic but a sequence of meditations on what we risk losing as we offer phones ever more control over our lives…beautiful, elegantly expressed, Axelrod manag[es] to communicate both the strength of his conviction and the difficulty of persuading others to share it.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Axelrod makes a compelling argument for drawing a new kind of map, one that helps us as we search and stumble between the borderlines of our digital and physical worlds . . . he meditates on the ways our screens are changing our relationship to time, space, and each other, while dipping into philosophy, astronomy, neuroscience, and poetry. Like his memoir, it’s an intimate book; he discusses big themes, big ideas, but the feel is as though you are leaning in close across a table in a dimly lit space.”
—The Boston Globe
“If we imagine, with wild configuration, Thoreau as one parenthesis, Axelrod could be the other, the two holding decades of social evolution between them. Thoreau appeared when America was still young, a seer who could caution how the newly invented telegraph could alter our natural sense of time and space; Axelrod shows us what that alteration now looks like. He makes clear what our new condition portends, and also makes clear, by his own example, that those former ways fronting the world are not yet completely lost. These are the stars in our pockets, the constellations that have guided our navigation for so long.”
—Sven Birkerts, AGNI Magazine
“Poetic, ruminative, and never preachy, this book is a game changer for readers who yearn to see beyond 240 characters.”
—Booklist, Starred Review
“A provocative inquiry . . . Refreshingly, Axelrod doesn’t deliver a screed against cybertechnology but rather a series of philosophical meditations on the consequences of connecting ourselves digitally to the point where the realm of the screen is a world unto itself.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Axelrod provides powerful arguments against today’s all-encompassing digital world in this concise and insightful meditation.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Timely, essential, generous...Put down your phone and read this book. Maybe even get your friends to read it, too, and then have the kinds of conversations about it that can’t be had on social media.”
—Chicago Tribune
Praise for The Point of Vanishing
“What makes his book completely mesmerizing—besides his lovely prose, that is—is how exquisitely it balances between the poles of revelation and disintegration. At times, in the depths of winter, when Axelrod becomes preoccupied with observing the changing color of shadows on the snow, he seems on the verge of a transcendent understanding of how to exist entirely in the present.”
—Slate Book Review
“Mr. Axelrod is clearly a gifted writer . . . The best thing about Mr. Axelrod’s frequently absorbing book is how idiosyncratic it feels; he is a unique presence on the page.”
—New York Times Daily Review
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2019-09-29
A provocative inquiry into the necessity of "a new map with the digital world and the traits it calls for, and with the old physical world and the traits it calls for, and with the borders clearly marked where the two realms conflict."
Refreshingly, Axelrod (Director, Creative Writing/Loyola Univ. Chicago; A Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude, 2015, etc.) doesn't deliver a screed against cybertechnology but rather a series of philosophical meditations on the consequences of connecting ourselves digitally to the point where the realm of the screen is a world unto itself. In the woods of Vermont, where he had found sanctuary from media stimuli, he reflected on how "everything I encountered—or didn't encounter—was quietly altering my sense of time, my sense of place, and the quality of my attention and memory. What I was experiencing was changing how I was experiencing." His return to civilization resulted in sensory overload, as long walks in the woods gave way to crowded sidewalks of pedestrians focused on the experience provided by their earbuds and omnipresent smartphones, both connecting and isolating each one of them. Throughout this illuminating journey, Axelrod explores how conversational inquiry has reduced itself to texts and tweets, how a Google search has convinced a civilization that everything it needs to know can be known instantly, and how GPS gives us directions that undermine the serendipity of finding one's own way. He discusses the concept of "neural Darwinism," how "natural selection happens on both sides of your eyes" and "certain populations of neurons get selected and their connections grow stronger, while others go the way of the dodo bird." The author also ponders identity, interaction, mystery, and the strange sense of returning to one place, physically and geographically, while adapting to the cyber realm, where "we're effectively living in two places at once."
The wide focus of a generalist makes readers reflect profoundly on what we lose as the cyberworld tightens its leash.
