May I toot my own horn?

Two nice notices of The Shallows appeared out of the online blue today, and doggone it if I'm not going to share them. At Paste, Kurt Armstrong reviewed the book, calling it "essential": It lays out a sweeping portrait of the thing we're moving too quickly to see. It's easy for someone like me to piece together opinions or carve rhetorically charged rants about the deleterious effects of our growing technological dependency. In contrast, Carr's book bursts with research — from neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists and sociologists — and careful analysis. And anxious as Carr might be about what the Internet is doing to our brains, his writing isn't shrill or self-righteous. It's intelligent, deeply researched, articulate and, much to my dismay, most likely prophetic: "The great danger we face as we become more intimately involved with our computers … is that we'll begin to lose our humanness, to sacrifice the very qualities that separate us from machines." And at The Millions, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer pegged The Shallows as "the best book I read last year": Carr persuasively — and with great subtlety and beauty — makes the case that it is not only the content of our thoughts that...