This overlong book cries out for further pruning of both text and photos (including 32 featuring Moore, many of them head...
An authorized biography of the little-known chemist who helped create Silicon Valley.
Now a billionaire in his mid-80s, Gordon Moore earned his doctorate at Caltech, and in the 1950s and ’60s, he created and led two of the nation’s most influential technology firms, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. He pioneered the chemical process for making transistors—the building bricks in microchips—which power everything in modern society from missiles and satellites to smartphones and other consumer technologies. In this admiring, richly detailed book, Chemical Heritage Foundation founding CEO Thackray (Atoms and Powers, 2013, etc.), electronics journalist Brock, and technology journalist Jones recount Moore’s life as “the master of transistor technology and the prophet of the microchip’s promise.” His “Moore’s Law,” posited 50 years ago, predicted accurately that computing power will double every two years. In contrast to many Silicon Valley moguls, Moore has long been a quiet, unpretentious figure who has eschewed wealth and fame and lived a practical life guided by facts, not feelings. Based largely on oral history transcripts, the authors tell Moore’s story from his childhood as a California sheriff’s son to his early work with physicist William Shockley to his tremendous success at Intel, where Andy Grove, his “interpreter, enforcer, and hatchet man,” helped him achieve his agenda. They portray a driven, intensely focused scientist and businessman who took comfort in his love of the outdoors and his conventional family life. The silicon transistor is “the object most crafted by humans.” By 1995, the 30th anniversary of Moore’s declaration of Moore’s Law, more than 70 million billion had been produced.
This overlong book cries out for further pruning of both text and photos (including 32 featuring Moore, many of them head shots), but techies will be delighted with its full treatment of an important figure often overshadowed by such luminaries as Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-05564-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
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
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