A valuable history for tech heads, entrepreneurs, and trend watchers alike.
The decline and fall of the first iteration of the internet, told with verve and style by Guardian and Sunday Times contributor Smith (Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, 2005).
An empire-building technological entrepreneur, Josh Harris founded the aptly named Pseudo.com after having worked at the edges of the new internet for a decade. Smith plunges into Harris’ weird world, which gets increasingly more improbable as he leaves his company in the hands of subordinates and wanders off in quest of “increasingly dangerous-looking social experiments,” for which Ecstasy-fueled, disco-pounding raves were just an aperitif. That emerging world, half real and half virtual, imploded with the dot-com bust, and Harris disappeared into the New York countryside and other very real venues afterward. Though he was a failure in absolute dollar terms in a time when trillions of them evaporated, Harris, by the author’s account, was very much a pioneer in the right place at the right time, at least for a time. He was on hand to ride the wave by which two economies emerged, “a real one, where stuff was made and value added, and a speculative one, where value was traded, leveraged, staked.” Perhaps unnecessarily, Smith veers into the Ur-world of Doug Engelbart, Stewart Brand, and the Silicon Valley thinkers before looping back into Harris’ glory days, building on themes such as the cyclical rise and fall of New York, the ever more abstract economy, and the development of a culture that is increasingly unmoored to anything real. On the last point, the author closes with a view of Harris, who is still around, as not necessarily “the cyber Syd Barrett," a martyr of the boom-and-bust digital world, but instead someone who foresaw the present, in which status is measured by the number of likes, page views, and plays a person is able to amass, a culture of which the likes of Facebook is only the start.
A valuable history for tech heads, entrepreneurs, and trend watchers alike.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2934-5
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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