In her New York Times review of William Powers' book "Hamlet's BlackBerry," Laurie Winer reminds us that the things we fear losing at the hands of new technology -- reading on paper, for example -- were once themselves contested new inventions.

[T]ry to imagine the fears of the 15th-century Italian scholar who saw Gutenberg's printing press mostly as a license to erode seriousness and to libel others. He wrote: "Because now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write merely for the sake of entertainment. . . . And even when they write something worthwhile they twist it and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books."

Powers, it seems, moves beyond the debate over whether technology makes us smarter or dumber and focuses on what really matters: how do we learn to cope with it.

Read the full review at The New York Times.