An illuminating, unsentimental biography of William H. Gates III, youthful cofounder of Microsoft—the multibillion-dollar enterprise that dominates the world of PC software. While Manes (a columnist for PC/Computing) and Andrews (a Seattle Times correspondent) do a better job of explaining the commercial/technical significance of their subjects's contributions to a transforming industry than did James Wallace and Jim Erickson in Hard Drive (p. 526), they provide more detail than many readers may care to absorb. Drawing on access to Gates as well as to his family, associates, and rivals, Manes and Andrews offer a like-it-is portrait of an archetypal nerd who built a world-class business empire. They follow the abrasive, ultracompetitive Harvard dropout from a privileged boyhood in the Pacific Northwest through his creation, with Paul Allen, of the first computer language for PCs and of Microsoft and more. Along his fast track to the top, Gates (now 37) helped develop DOS (the pace-setting computer operating system), joined forces with IBM (an alliance that subsequently dissolved in acrimony), and made notable enemies (including Apple). Although the focused, obsessive entrepreneur devotes most of his waking hours to work, the authors make clear that he has a lively, if unconventional, social life, which has included virtual ``dates'' in which he and an old flame attended the same movie in different cities and discussed it via car phones on their respective ways home. Manes and Andrews also illustrate how, for all his achievements, Gates remains envious of genuine scientific genius capable of breakthroughs on the cutting edge of technology. An exhaustive report on an aging whiz-kid whose consequential life story is far from over. The scrupulously documented text has 16 pages of photos (not seen).
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-42075-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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