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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here.Joe Carillo
Facebook: Great success from interconnecting the world’s millions
In the recently released The Facebook Effect (Simon & Schuster, 384 pages), veteran technology reporter David Kirkpatrick tells the fascinating story of a company that, in just a matter of five years, has transformed the Internet by becoming the second-most-visited Web site on earth after Google. From a small web project put up in a college dormitory by a 19-year-old Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook now has an estimated 500 million users and has become one of the fastest growing companies in history. Even more important from the utility standpoint, Facebook has become essential to the social life not only of teenagers but of many millions of adults all over the world (Full disclosure: I am a recent Facebook member and I have just begun to discover its great potential for networking and for expanding this Forum’s membership base.)
Reviewing The Facebook Effect for the June 24, 2010 issue of The New York Times, David Pogue says that Kirkpatrick’s book “is a well-researched, nicely structured account of all the wheeling and dealing” that made Facebook what it is today. However, he finds fault with its storytelling—descriptions repeated so many times that reading the book feels “like being at a party where some guy tells the same joke over and over in the same conversation”; a low-key, workmanlike writing but one that’s punctuated by jarring grammatical constructions; and an on-the-level narrative that’s unfortunately marked by “a good deal of hero worship” and less-than-objective reporting on the lawsuits that have troubled Facebook’s history.
In another review of The Facebook Effect that came out in the June 27, 2010 issue of the Washington Post, David Harsanyi says he finds Kirkpatrick’s book “crisply written” but “so frustrating to read.” He explains: “For one thing, even a business book should strive to explain what motivates its hero. Certainly, we can forgive Kirkpatrick, a longtime Fortune magazine reporter, for not boring too deeply into the soul of a 20-year-old, but I wish there were more clues to the working of Zuckerberg’s mind.” Harsanyi acknowledges The Facebook Effect as a meticulously sourced book, but is disappointed that it “too often succumbs to the author’s esteem for his subject matter.”
Read David Pogue’s “Humanity’s Database” in The New York Times now!
Read David Harsanyi’s review of The Facebook Effect in the Washington Post now!
Read an excerpt from David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect now!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Kirkpatrick was for many years the senior editor for Internet and technology at Fortune magazine. While at Fortune, he wrote cover stories about Apple, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sun, and numerous other technology subjects. Beginning in 2001, he created Fortune’s Brainstorm conference series. More recently, he organized the Techonomy conference on the centrality of technology innovation for all human activity. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and appears frequently on television, radio, and the Internet as an expert on technology.
