A heck of a yarn, full of vivid characters, reversals of fortune and stubborn determination: Pixar should make a movie out...
Brisk history of an entertainment juggernaut that is also the history of computer animation.
While it’s now standard in children’s entertainment, writes Price (Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation, 2005), computer animation was in its earliest incarnations the province of technically minded geniuses beavering away in universities and labs. There they constructed impossibly complex algorithms that solved problems of realistic movement, texture, lighting and a host of other reality-mimicking conditions out of sheer scientific zeal; practical applications ran along the lines of enhanced medical imaging. A small handful of individuals, including former Disney animator John Lasseter, saw the new technology as the next step in animated storytelling. George Lucas played a critical (if characteristically aloof) role in early support of Pixar’s efforts, and offbeat, difficult and preternaturally charismatic visionary Steve Jobs funded the company at a financial loss for years, furiously determined to prove that his phenomenal early success at Apple was no fluke. Lasseter, a dreamy California kid obsessed with juvenile Americana, emerges as this story’s hero: a tireless, passionate advocate of the possibilities of computer animation who applied the classic Disney lessons of emotional involvement, expressive characterization and solid storytelling to the new medium and produced such modern classics as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Cars. Pixar’s relationship with corporate parent Disney provides much of the book’s drama. Jobs and Disney head Michael Eisner locked horns in an epically ugly battle over the terms of their companies’ collaboration, and ex-Eisner lieutenant Jeffrey Katzenberg waged a frontal assault on Pixar’s market under the auspices of DreamWorks SKG. But the heart of the story is the animators, gentle revolutionaries and oddball alchemists who never faltered in their quest to wed hard science to creative vision and bring animation into a new era of artistic accomplishment.
A heck of a yarn, full of vivid characters, reversals of fortune and stubborn determination: Pixar should make a movie out of it.Pub Date: May 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26575-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An informative and creatively multilayered Google guidebook from the businessman’s perspective.
Two distinguished technology executives share the methodology behind what made Google a global business leader.
Former Google CEO Schmidt (co-author: The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, 2013) and former senior vice president of products Rosenberg share accumulated wisdom and business acumen from their early careers in technology, then later as management at the Internet search giant. Though little is particularly revelatory or unexpected, the companywide processes that have made Google a household name remain timely and relevant within today’s digitized culture. After several months at Google, the authors found it necessary to retool their management strategies by emphasizing employee culture, codifying company values, and rethinking the way staff is internally positioned in order to best compliment their efforts and potential. Their text places “Googlers” front and center as they adopted the business systems first implemented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who stressed the importance of company-wide open communication. Schmidt and Rosenberg discuss the value of technological insights, Google’s effective “growth mindset” hiring practices, staff meeting maximization, email tips, and the company’s effective solutions to branding competition and product development complications. They also offer a condensed, two-page strategy checklist that serves as an apt blueprint for managers. At times, statements leak into self-congratulatory territory, as when Schmidt and Rosenberg insinuate that a majority of business plans are flawed and that the Google model is superior. Analogies focused on corporate retention and methods of maximizing Google’s historically impressive culture of “smart creatives” reflect the firm’s legacy of spinning intellect and creativity into Internet gold. The authors also demarcate legendary application missteps like “Wave” and “Buzz” while applauding the independent thinkers responsible for catapulting the company into the upper echelons of technological innovation.
An informative and creatively multilayered Google guidebook from the businessman’s perspective.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1455582341
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Business Plus/Grand Central
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.
Noted number cruncher Sperling delivers an economist’s rejoinder to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Former director of the National Economic Council in the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the author has long taken a view of the dismal science that takes economic justice fully into account. Alongside all the metrics and estimates and reckonings of GDP, inflation, and the supply curve, he holds the great goal of economic policy to be the advancement of human dignity, a concept intangible enough to chase the econometricians away. Growth, the sacred mantra of most economic policy, “should never be considered an appropriate ultimate end goal” for it, he counsels. Though 4% is the magic number for annual growth to be considered healthy, it is healthy only if everyone is getting the benefits and not just the ultrawealthy who are making away with the spoils today. Defining dignity, admits Sperling, can be a kind of “I know it when I see it” problem, but it does not exist where people are a paycheck away from homelessness; the fact, however, that people widely share a view of indignity suggests the “intuitive universality” of its opposite. That said, the author identifies three qualifications, one of them the “ability to meaningfully participate in the economy with respect, not domination and humiliation.” Though these latter terms are also essentially unquantifiable, Sperling holds that this respect—lack of abuse, in another phrasing—can be obtained through a tight labor market and monetary and fiscal policy that pushes for full employment. In other words, where management needs to come looking for workers, workers are likely to be better treated than when the opposite holds. In still other words, writes the author, dignity is in part a function of “ ‘take this job and shove it’ power,” which is a power worth fighting for.
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7987-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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