A singular and entertaining tech account.
A debut biography/memoir tells the story of Silicon Valley outlaw Captain Crunch.
Draper, once known by the pseudonym Captain Crunch, is most famous for inventing “the little blue box,” a homemade piece of phone-hacking equipment that allowed users to make calls anywhere in the world for free. (Two of the people he shared his invention with were youngsters Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who briefly manufactured and sold a version of the box.) But Draper’s career and influence went far beyond this early innovation of the Phone Phreak movement. Working as a contractor for the company that Jobs and Wozniak went on to found—a little outfit called Apple Computer, Inc.—Draper developed the first word processor. Later, as a thought leader of the internet privacy movement, he created the first working firewall. A prankster, rabble-rouser, and eventual activist, he landed himself in prison several times during the 1970s and ’80s for his hacking activities, leading many figures in Silicon Valley to hold him at a distance. With the help of Fraser, Draper is now telling his story for the first time: the inventions, the police busts, the parties, and the chance encounters in a world populated by tech entrepreneurs and countercultural freaks. Fraser’s frame narration, which is primarily set in the recent past and follows the composition of the book, is sharp and readable. But it is the sections narrated by Draper himself where the real meat is, even if these are rendered in his simple prose. Here he describes his activities after being released from jail one time: “We headed back up to San Jose. I had to report to my probation officer. I hooked up with Woz again when I got back up to Silicon Valley. He had built a few more complete Apple II prototypes.” The book’s self-aware structure and the prominence of Fraser as a character are peculiar choices, but a work about a figure as idiosyncratic as Draper is bound to be a bit odd. Anyone interested in the rise of the tech industry should be fascinated by the strange but influential role that Draper—Captain Crunch—played on its margins.
A singular and entertaining tech account.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 245
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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