by Arnold Thackray & David Brock & Rachel Jones ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2015
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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