Sadly, there’s no moral to be learned in Rivlin’s weak tale, a classic example of a magazine article fattened up to make a...
A thin profile—in every sense—of one of the few high-tech movers and shakers who has so far failed to become a household name.
Now in his early 50s, Ron Conway was raised in Silicon Valley, where he got to know some of the geeks and wonks who would put personal computers in every home. Though not particularly technically adept himself, Conway quickly proved himself to be a gifted salesman, “never a crude backslapper,” as journalist Rivlin (A Fire on the Prairie, 1992) puts it, “but instead the type who killed you through attention.” That talent served Conway well as he talked his way onto the boards and into the stock-option plans of one startup after another, amassing a sizable fortune while carefully spending other people’s money. His influence grew with his founding a venture-capital fund called Angel Investors, which capped at $150 million in 1999 and had holdings in dozens of tech firms large and small—which, in turn, had holdings in the fund, the high-tech world evidently having little interest in the question of conflict of interest. Conway rode (and sometimes drove) the dot.com boom for all it was worth, netting his investors massive returns and garnering a reputation for turning one dollar into ten nearly overnight. When reality caught up and the tech bull market got swallowed by a giant bear, Conway’s fund declined with all the rest; at the end, Rivlin quotes the once-optimistic Conway: “At this point, I'd be happy if I was able to get people their money back.” Conway has something of Gatsby about him, but Rivlin doesn’t tell us much about what makes him tick, and he fails to provide any of the parallel-universe detail that makes Po Bronson’s The Nudist on the Late Shift, Michael Lewis’s The New New Thing, and Douglas Coupland’s thinly fictionalized Microserfs such absorbing reading on the matter of Silicon Valley.
Sadly, there’s no moral to be learned in Rivlin’s weak tale, a classic example of a magazine article fattened up to make a book—and, in this case, an e-book as well.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2001
ISBN: 0-8129-9163-X
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
An informed inquiry into the reasons for Southeast Asia's remarkable prosperity and the West's chances of capitalizing on it. Drawing on anecdotal as well as statistical evidence gathered in his post as a Hong Kongbased economist for CS First Boston (and previously as a roving correspondent for the Economist), Rohwer offers an upbeat appraisal of the vast region that 58 percent of the world's population calls home. (By the author's reckoning, Asia includes the Indian subcontinent and the Philippines, but he treats Japan as a special case.) Delving into the factors that have helped keep the pace of economic growth in this vast domain at enviable levels over the past quarter century, Rohwer singles out the refusal of local governments to provide social safety nets of the sort found in Europe's and North America's welfare states. Among other favorable outcomes, he observes, the absence of such a support system has reduced tax burdens, induced workers to save more of their income, strengthened family ties, and directed such people investments as have been made into productive channels (e.g., secondary rather than higher education). The author also credits US intervention in Vietnam with having prevented the area's capitalist semi-democracies (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, et al.) from falling to communism. On the downside, Rohwer notes that the Pacific basin's financial institutions and infrastructure are not what they ought to be at this stage of the region's development. Nor, in his view, are its authoritarian governments as open and accountable as they could be. Given Asia's literate young labor force, receptivity to outside ideas, and expanding consumer class, he expects the territory not only to consolidate its gains but also to afford greater commercial opportunities to nimble multinationals. A judicious but lively take on a region that could give its name to the next century. (maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80752-1
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A numbing indictment of our blindness to the new forms of slavery engendered by the global economy. Bales, a leading authority on this subject (Univ. of Surrey, England), defines slavery, quite specifically, as the “total control of one person by another for the purpose of economic exploitation.” The control is facilitated by violence and the foreclosure of personal freedom. He estimates, given this definition, that there are approximately 27 million slaves currently held in the world economy. One of the more virulent characteristics of this new slavery is a tendency to view slaves as relatively short-term investments—replacement is often cheaper than maintenance, thus the slaveholders will extract as much labor as possible, even if it means their victims will only last for several years of bondage. New slaveholders in the world economy also frequently insulate themselves against prosecution by maintaining fraudulent work contracts. Bales opens his essay with the story of Seba, a woman brought to France from Mali to serve as a house slave, but the book focuses primarily upon slavery in the third world. He describes the plight of child prostitutes in Thailand, slaves born under control of the White Moors in Mauritania, charcoal workers in Brazil, brick kiln operators in Pakistan, bonded farmers in India, and prisoners of war in Burma. He provides both personal accounts from the lives of individual slaves, and an overview of legal, political, and historical factors which influence the particular manifestation of slavery in a given locality. Bales makes a convincing argument that the new forms of slavery are directly related to trends in the global economy, and that opposition to slavery must also take the form of an international, global awareness of the situation. A powerful exposÇ of the dirty little secret of the global village. (12 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-520-21797-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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