An invaluable insider’s guide both to the IT explosion and to surviving massive tech advances.
A new edition of a book chronicling the early years of computers.
Centering on the period from the 1970s to 2000, Simson charts the rise of the computer industry and the men and women who helped transform it. As Simson puts it, he had a ringside seat for the period, running, along with his wife, the “quietly powerful” think tank Research Board, which “observed and occasionally guided the computer industry.” From this vantage point, he met many of the crucial figures of the period, including Bill Gates (who “intuited that the future belonged to volume”) and Steve Jobs (who expanded the personal computer market “from thousands of enthusiasts to millions of homes”) and learned some essential lessons. One important lesson was that “vision is a perishable currency until executed,” and another, equally central, dealt with “how disruptive technology can work to destroy even those who understand it well.” Simson looks at a variety of powerhouse companies, like Hewlett-Packard, Wang Labs, Digital Equipment, and IBM, and he profiles some of the company leaders who had to deal with upheavals in IT, showing their insights and mistakes. Ken Olsen, for instance, the head of Digital Equipment and the man who famously said, “There is no need for a computer in the home” (“the remark,” Simson notes, “that draws squeals of disbelief to this day”), is characterized as “a brilliant strategist who lost his touch” as his company failed to adapt to industry changes. Simson is a knowledgeable, insightful guide, and although his insights are often densely wonkish (“product-group allocations of scarce technical resources were entirely self-serving and without regard for the revenue potential of a company’s account as a whole,” and so on), he astutely notes the root cause of corporate failure in the face of seismic changes: the tendency of upper management to stubbornly stick around instead of leaving or changing.
An invaluable insider’s guide both to the IT explosion and to surviving massive tech advances.Pub Date: April 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781663250537
Page Count: 438
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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