Danielle

Chronicles of a Superheroine and How You Can Be a Danielle

By: Ray Kurzweil

Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo

Length: 14 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

Ray Kurzweil, legendary inventor and author of New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind, has created inventions and ideas that have changed human civilization. PBS called him "One of the revolutionaries who made America", and Inc. magazine named him "Edison's rightful heir".   

Now, Kurzweil has created a novel and an unforgettable character - Danielle - to help convey some of his most important ideas. Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine tells the story of a precocious young girl who uses her intelligence and accelerating technology to solve humanity's grandest challenges. Now, if only we can find more courageous visionaries like Danielle.  

Written as an alternative history, Danielle's journey as a driven young girl brings her face-to-face with many important figures from recent history and our modern world. Told through the eyes of Danielle's equally remarkable sister, Claire, a girl adopted from Haiti after surviving the earthquake, this story shows all listeners a hopeful vision of humanity's future - and how to achieve it.

©2018 Ray Kurzweil (P)2019 Tantor

Teach in school

This book needs to serve as a class in every school. It would. Hang many lives and improve the world.

A bit long novel, useful companion works!

Liked chapter 42-44 and the one on AI in the companion works . Very insightful !

Change can do you good, Kurzweil fans. I LOVED IT!

Ok, I have known Kurzweil"s books for a long time, and I have to admit when I saw that this book was YA (Young Adult) I thought "Kurzweil must be crazy." Well, I discovered that he's not crazy, he's having great fun in this book showing kids of all ages the joy of what a world could be like if we had a few more Danielles with amazing superhero minds in it. Truth is, we have lots of Danielle in this world now. Amazing young people who are changing the talk on climate change, finding new medical breakthroughs, even helping find black holes. Look, my fellow Kurzweil fans, this is a superhero book! If you want another heady Kurzweil book, I hear that "The Singularity Is Nearer" comes out next year. If you want a bit of fun, an alternate universe, if you want to see a lighter side of the mind of Mr. Kurzweil, then get this book, it's great.
I LOVED IT!!!!!

Somewhat boring and tedious - lacking in creativity - AI would have written a better story

Kurzweil is very good at communicating facts and this story does a fairly good job of pointing out the uses for certain technologies and ideologies in a modern society. However, it fails at creative storytelling, fairly dramatically. Kurzweil fails to create emotional connections for the reader with the characters and fails to build a captivating, dramatic narrative. While I wholeheartedly agree with most or even all of the ideas that Kurzweil presents within this story, nonetheless, I find it tedious and preachy. Despite that he is preaching to the choir here, the failure to approach concepts from a dramatically interesting perspective results in a story and storytelling that fall fairly flat, the narrator’s presentation of the ideas are similarly flat.

Kurzweil could stand to learn a lot from the storytelling about optimal uses of technology to further sociological, political, cultural, or ideological goals from storytellers like Neal Stephenson, or William Gibson. It saddens me to leave a review like this for what this book was clearly, a labor of love… but I struggled mightily to even be able to finish it for the tedium. I think with some assistance, time, and effort - RK is capable of producing a far more captivating book. He perhaps should focus more on the ability to create interesting dialog such as creators like Tarantino or Kevin Smith, or perhaps styling a book with some intelligent intrigue like the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Danielle would have served better as subplot for a middling video game telling an alternative version of history where the player was acting out the 1st person perspective of their character - Danielle.

If you like Kurzweil, skip this one

The second half was alright as it presented some cool resources, but the first half which included the story was super cringe.

Not about AI...

It is not abou AÍ... is about great humanitarian causes, and uses the trend on AI to call attention