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 are radically altered by phones and computers, but the structure of our brains — our ability to have certain kinds of thoughts and experiences. And the kinds of thoughts and experiences at stake are those that have defined our humanity. Carr is not a proselytizer, and he is no techno-troglodyte. He is a profoundly sharp thinker and writer — equal parts journalist, psychologist, popular science writer, and philosopher. I have not only given this book to numerous friends, I actually changed my life in response to it.

Suddenly, I’m in the mood to go out and do some caroling.