Two Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporters take on—and fumble- -the fascinating tale of how an archetypal nerd built a multibillion-dollar enterprise that sets the standards for PC/work- station software. In Accidental Empires (1991), Robert X. Cringely tells more in brief about William Henry Gates III (cofounder of Microsoft) and his game plan than the authors manage to do in an entire book. Wallace and Erickson do make a competent job of chronicling the dramatic rise of a quirky Harvard dropout whose technical/commercial genius coexists uneasily with an impatient, demanding, and ultracompetitive personality. They follow Gates from privileged youth at a Seattle prep school through his creation (at 19) with Paul Allen of the first computer language for PCs and beyond, to the establishment of Microsoft, which eventually made them billionaires. Along the way, the single-minded Gates, now 36, helped develop the computer operating system DOS, forged a since- ruptured alliance with IBM, and evidently became willing to do whatever it takes to keep Microsoft atop the programming heap. Among other consequences of his intimidating management style are lost friendships—and a potentially ruinous lawsuit, in which Apple seeks billions in damages for copyright infringement. But by focusing on Gates's less admirable idiosyncrasies and on anecdotal trivia, the authors miss much of the point of his empire-building ends and means. Nor, absent wider-angle perspectives on the fragmented software industry, do they convey with any real impact how Gates intends to parlay essentially mediocre technology into a perdurably dominant market position. While the authors supply many of the pieces missing from the public record, they don't quite have the whole story. A full account of Gates and his empire probably awaits someone like Cringely, with a firmer grasp on where PCs are taking the Global Village.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-471-56886-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
