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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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