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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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