A Deadly Wandering

By -
A Deadly Wandering, by Matt Richtel

The start of a new school year means a new Book In Common in our city.  The university and the community college cooperate to choose a book, get people interested, and have the author come and speak.  I don't always read the BIC pick, but this year's title piqued my interest.  And I was pretty entertained when my older daughter came home and said it was on her English syllabus, so could we get a copy?  And I flipped over the book, which was right on the table.  Heh.

In 2006, people were just starting to use texting on cell phones to communicate when Reggie Shaw, a very ordinary nice kid from Utah, drifted a bit across the center line and caused a car accident that killed two men -- both scientists with families.  It wasn't immediately clear how it had happened, but Reggie was a habitual texter.  The investigation and findings turned into a landmark case, showing that texting while driving is much more dangerous than anyone had (at that time) realized.

Richtel intertwines three (sometimes more) plotlines, following Reggie, victim advocate Terryl, and the development of the science of attention.  It's interesting, often riveting, and thought-provoking.  How many of us look at our phones while driving?  Texting turns out to be especially dangerous, grabbing our attention away from the road, but there are plenty of other screen-based distractions as well.  Newer cars are even putting screens on the dashboard; our culture tells us that multi-tasking is good.  Well, maybe it isn't always.

An informative read.  But if you want the TL;DR version: don't text while you drive.

Comments

  1. Kristen M.September 5, 2017 at 10:53 PM

    Having a new driver coming up in just a couple of years is really starting to stress me out. Hubby and I are hoping that safety features like auto-braking will be standard soon and that most people will have wised up about things like texting while driving.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanSeptember 6, 2017 at 1:41 PM

    I feel ya! I think that texting is remarkably hard to resist. Most people feel like they can do it safely (though everybody else can't), even in the face of strong evidence that it is very impairing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. jrleekOctober 11, 2017 at 11:24 AM

    I've been worried about this since Tom almost killed me by fiddling with the radio on East ave. (He looked up just in time to see the car stopped in front of us.)

    Now it's much worse, not only cell phones, but most cars are full of complex poorly designed gadgets. I'm pretty sure smart phones are safer than the DVD player/GPS/OnStar/MP3 Player/Whatever built into most cars these days. At least the cell phone can be voice activated.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more