A readable, melodramatic treatment of the ascent of a popular internet startup.
The messy business of tech culture as seen through the threads and histrionics of Reddit.
Noted technology journalist and Inc. senior writer Lagorio-Chafkin diligently peels back the layered, tumultuous history of controversial web startup Reddit, which began as a discussion board platform envisioned as “the front page of the Internet.” The author began writing about the online sensation in 2011 after meeting with Reddit’s co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, friends who met and instantly bonded at the University of Virginia in 2001. Unsure her project’s material would be sufficient for a full-length book, Lagorio-Chafkin amassed a stockpile of firsthand information from scores of interviews with current and former employees, leaked chat logs, and other sources. This surfeit of detail becomes more problematic after the author establishes the tech company’s early origins and “wondrous traffic beast” growth, spurred by Huffman and Ohanian’s keen development of the Reddit theoretical framework alongside Aaron Swartz, a “hacker prodigy with a libertarian bent and a flair for the dramatic.” Once Condé Nast’s 2006 acquisition of the site made young millionaires of the trio, their relationships with each other and with the industry changed. Ohanian’s mother’s death in 2008 radically shifted his perspective. A few years later, Huffman handed over his CEO post to a successor, and Swartz committed suicide after being charged in an MIT wire fraud scandal. More leadership shake-ups would occur within the Reddit executive echelon before both originators returned to the company in 2015 after changes had been made to detoxify the site’s much-abused “user anonymity and almost-anything-goes content policy.” Lagorio-Chafkin captures the ensuing vortex of tech-nerd office politics with a novelistic flair, but her verbosity hijacks some of the excitement of the site’s rise to prominence. Still, die-hard Reddit fans and readers dazzled by the machinations of the technology and web development business will enjoy the hijinks.
A readable, melodramatic treatment of the ascent of a popular internet startup.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-43537-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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