Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine - Hardcover

Ray Kurzweil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1614756392 ISBN 13: 9781614756392

Publisher: WordFire Press, 2019

Synopsis

Ray Kurzweil, legendary inventor and author of New York Times bestsellers 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 name 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 readers a hopeful vision of humanity's future-and how to achieve it.

The novel features 24 graphic novel-style illustrations, one for each year of Danielle's life, by New Yorker cartoonist and Ray's daughter, Amy Kurzweil (author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir, a New York Times Editor's Pick and Best of 2016).

Accompanying the novel are two nonfiction companion works by the author, which is a literary first. Included in this volume is How You Can Be A Danielle, a call to action, providing pragmatic, thought-provoking and clear guidance on how readers can be inspired to emulate Danielle and help bring about a better world. A separate volume, A Chronicle of Ideas: A Guide for Superheroines (and Superheroes) provides Kurzweil's-and Danielle's-unique spin on 282 concepts presented in the novel.Age Range: Teen

About this title

About the Author:

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called ''the restless genius'' by The Wall Street Journal and ''the ultimate thinking machine'' by Forbes magazine, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the ''rightful heir to Thomas Edison.'' PBS selected him as one of the ''sixteen revolutionaries who made America.''

Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Among Ray's many honors, he received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.

Ray has written five national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How To Create A Mind (2012). He is Co-Founder and Chancellor of Singularity University and a Director of Engineering at Google heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.

Review:

"Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine is a coming-of-age novel that also serves as a call to action.

In American inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil's young adult coming-of-age epic Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, capable children are given the freedom to innovate solutions to real world problems.

An American aid worker adopts Claire, a six-year-old Haitian girl who's left orphaned after an earthquake devastates her island. Her baby sister, Danielle, is born two years later. At first, she seems verbally and physically delayed, but she surprises her family when she's two with her advanced conversational and abstract thinking skills.

The girls' father is inspired to start the Stern School (inspired by the nineteenth century, progressive Stern Schule, founded by Kurzweil's great-grandmother) to foster his children's remarkable skills, with a nontraditional, interdisciplinary curriculum whose lessons can be applied in the field. Danielle's ideas evolve into policies that solve global economic, health, and political crises, turning her into an in-demand star.

The book follows a structure akin to the scientific method. Chapters are organized as year-by-year episodes from Danielle's childhood and adolescence. Those that cover her childhood are short, but chapters become longer in her adolescence when the conceptual problems she deals with become more complex.

Each chapter describes a pressing global concern that Danielle wishes to address. Danielle, as supervised by Claire, devises hypothetical solutions that she tests in the field and modifies her procedures as conflicts arise. She achieves varying degrees of success. This consistent structure, along with short, to-the-point sentences, keep the story's pace even. Well-placed dialogue between narrative paragraphs keeps the story moving forward with few breaks in its action.

Though it is written in a way that's accessible to young adults, the book's abstract concepts in quantum physics, advanced math, and economic theory are sometimes difficult to follow. The most challenging moments are limited to later chapters in the book.

Divided into two distinct parts, the book's first half reads like standard fiction, while it's second half acts as a companion to the first, with suggestions for becoming a self-made superhero and facilitating action. Amy Kurzweil's graphic novel illustrations help to break the story up into digestible chunks.

Claire and Danielle function as personifications of Kurzweil's economic, political, and scientific leanings, and Claire's story runs second to the accomplishments of her sister. Her role is supporting: she is Danielle's caretaker, conscience, and adviser. Danielle herself is compulsive and precocious, and so it's Claire's voice that grounds the story. Their Stern School classmates are conduits for explanations of the sisters' actions.

Danielle and Claire's alternative view of history can't help but end on a high note, given the "superhero" nature of Danielle's gifts and the ebullient optimism that follows each of their respective successes. The final takeaway is that there is no harm in trying something new; doing so might yield insights into and help to solve important issues.

An allegory about encouraging teenage inventiveness, Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine is a coming-of-age novel that also serves as a call to action."
--Foreword Clarion Review

"Danielle is a modern-day hero for everyone to look up to. A 'Wonder Woman' who doesn't need super-strength but rather, her own super brain. Ray's inspiring book makes you think about the small things you can do to better the world and that there are many ways one person can spark change. In a way, we are all Danielle, we have incredible minds and if we decided to use them together, we could really change the world like she does."
--Isabelle Fuhrman, Actress (The Hunger Games, Orphan, Masters of Sex)

"Ray Kurzweil has been my mentor and an inspiration to all those who desire to impact the world at global scale. In Danielle, you will find his teachings and the principles of exponential thinking that are already changing the world for the better. This work is a brilliant combination of fiction and nonfiction, something that has never been done before. A must-read for young people from 10 to 110!"
--Peter H. Diamandis, Cofounder (with Ray) of Singularity University, Cofounder & Chairman of XPRIZE. New York Times bestselling author of Abundance and Bold

"What do we need for the health and survival of our planet? For every young person to know that they also possess the courage, determination, creativity and intelligence of Danielle. Ray Kurzweil delivers a perspicacious thought experiment combining a poignant work of fiction with a deeply researched nonfiction guide for achieving profound positive change."
--Dean Ornish, M.D., Founder & President of The Preventive Medicine Research Institute; Clinical Professor of Medicine, UCSF. Best-selling author of The Spectrum and Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease. First to prove that heart disease and other chronic diseases are reversible by making lifestyle changes.

"Ray Kurzweil has been making the world better for countless numbers of people through the power of his ideas and inventions for decades, including giving me and millions of other blind people the ability to read. Now he shares with us a brilliant star, Danielle, who shines a light forward to a future with more peace, more love, and more understanding. Ray inspires each of us to be a Danielle and reach these goals through our gifts, our intelligence and our passion."
--Stevie Wonder

"A call-to-arms for the next generation of superheroines and superheroes. Ray Kurzweil's celebration of unbridled determination and experiential learning has brought us the adventures of the wondrous Danielle. Through his expansive imagination and singular storytelling ability, he's created an inspiring alternate history where a confident and courageous girl changes the world for the better. Through Danielle, Kurzweil helps us to see the qualities in ourselves that make each of us rare, valuable and capable. He also provides a compendium of tools and resources for effecting actual impact, making this work both a practical manual as well as a fantastical journey. I'll give this book to anyone I know who daydreams of being a real-life superhero!"
--Aimee Mullins, American athletic pioneer, first amputee in history to compete in Division I NCAA Track and Field; actress, fashion icon, National Women's Hall of Fame inductee

"Danielle is an inspiring page-turner that engages the heart and mind of young adults as well as free-thinking adults of all ages. It is as intellectually uplifting as Ray Kurzweil's other great books, but his trenchant lessons on techno-immortality and techno-abundance are now distilled into a storyline that has the makings of a classic fable. Amy Kurzweil's artwork are like meditation focal points that recapitulate the plot with iconic images. Danielle is a literary work exemplar of Einstein's adage that things should be made as simple as possible but no simpler. The Kurzweils have made the techno-progressive thesis accessible to all."
--Martine Rothblatt, founder Sirius Radio & United Therapeutics, transgender advocate, one of Forbes ''100 Greatest Living Business Minds'' and ''100 Wealthiest Self-Made Women'', author of Virtually Human

"It is not every day that the Edison of our day writes a novel on how you and I can solve the myriad problems that we face in society today. Now with Danielle, he shares his optimistic vision of the future in an accessible, understandable, and actionable way for audiences of all ages. Kurzweil encourages us to find the Danielle in each of us to create a better world together."
--Tony Robbins, New York Times #1 bestselling author, one of the ''Top 50 Business Intellectuals'' by Accenture, one of the ''Top 200 Business Gurus'' by the Harvard Business Review, included on the Forbes ''Celebrity 100''

"So much of what Ray has said was coming AI becoming smarter than people in one area after another, nanobots, health breakthroughs is becoming a reality, no small portion of which are derived from his own inspired inventions. Ray has now written a brilliant novel that shows how anyone, even a child, can transform the world with their ideas. I'll tell you what I think Ray is Danielle!"
--Suzanne Somers, New York Times bestselling author, entertainer and entrepreneur

"Packed with ideas on every page, Danielle is a pioneering hybrid of fact and fiction that presses each of us to ask: What actions can I take today to make the world a better place? Stirring in its message and epic in its scope, Danielle hands over the reins of the future to young people everywhere, inspiring readers to tackle the world's biggest challenges using a tool we already possess: our own minds."
--Rebecca Hanover, Emmy Award winning screenwriter, author of the YA novel The Similars (January 2019), and Ray Kurzweil's daughter-in-law!

About this edition

• Publisher: WordFire Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1614756392
• ISBN 13: 9781614756392
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 472