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HARD DRIVE

Name: HARD DRIVE
Author: James Wallace
ISBN: 0-471-56886-4

BILL GATES AND THE MAKING OF THE MICROSOFT EMPIRE

by James Wallace & Jim Erickson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1992

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)