A diligently crafted scrapbook of gratitude, accusation and excess, guaranteed to entertain and even ruffle a few feathers.
The highly anticipated, eyebrow-raising memoir of the other founding partner of the Microsoft Corporation.
Even at 58 and one of the wealthiest people in the world, Allen admits that writing his life story was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.” The result is surprisingly profound and refreshingly frank. Inspired by an oral-history project he’d initiated in 2000 to commemorate his early years with Microsoft, the author begins and ends his chronicle with nods to his friendship with “partner in crime” Bill Gates—from their beginnings driven by an all-consuming enthusiasm for computers to Gates’ regular appearances at Allen’s bedside as he defeated aggressive cancer. Yet it’s the often-turbulent years sandwiched in between that form the indulgent crux of this heavily jargonized narrative. Allen amiably retraces his Seattle roots raised by staunch booklovers as he dabbled in circuitry and mechanics. He honed rudimentary computer-programming skills while enrolled at a private school where he met Gates, who, at 13, was already competitive and scheming of wild successes. Lofty ambitions cut Allen’s collegiate career short, and, following many years of hard work, Microsoft was born in 1975, helmed by himself and increasingly tyrannical “taskmaster” Gates. Allen writes extensively of locking horns with his partner soon after the company became profitable, and, with the same heft used to praise the successes of a company that made him rich, he skewers his co-founder for his “mercenary opportunism” when conspired to dilute Allen’s Microsoft equity after he developed cancer. His disillusionment with the company, he writes, was “like a failed romance.” Allen spends the closing chapters elucidating his critically scrutinized interests in commercial space travel, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, neuroscience and, more recently, artificial intelligence.
A diligently crafted scrapbook of gratitude, accusation and excess, guaranteed to entertain and even ruffle a few feathers.Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59184-382-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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