An occasionally hagiographic but mostly illuminating portrait in which Cook’s performance is viewed as impressive and...
A praise-filled yet also critical one-decade performance report on Apple CEO Tim Cook.
In the wake of Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, Cook’s job description seemed simple enough: Don’t try to fill Jobs’ larger-than-life shoes; just keep his vision alive while moving the Silicon Valley giant into the future on its self-perpetuating course. Naturally, the critics predicted—even desired—for the newly Cook-helmed kingdom to crumble. However, as Apple watcher Kahney (Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products, 2013, etc.) writes, “the critics were wrong. Fast forward eight years, and under Cook’s leadership, Apple has been killing it. Since Jobs died, Apple reached the ultimate milestone, becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar company….Cook’s Apple is crushing the competition in almost every way.” From a full examination of the 2016 San Bernardino fiasco, when Cook faced his greatest challenge—ultimately defying government coercion in defense of user privacy—to highly detailed before and after measures of diversity, inclusion, and environmental advances, Kahney’s book is no rags-to-riches, blow-by-blow timeline of Cook’s life. While that element is present, the volume is more a study in comparisons: Jobs was this way, here’s how Cook differs, and here are the sum effects of those differences. While Jobs cast his shadow as the innovative big-tech dynamo, Cook cuts quite the contrast as the reserved, privacy-loving believer in ethics, equality, and environment. As the author amply demonstrates, these core areas most neglected by Jobs are where Cook has been placing his biggest emphasis as he continues to evolve Apple’s corporate culture with his own stamp of personality. Calling Apple under Jobs a “Fortune 500 killing machine” in its aggressive arc to the top, Kahney stresses that “Apple under Cook is different….He is pushing Apple and the entire tech industry forward, creating an ethical transformation.”
An occasionally hagiographic but mostly illuminating portrait in which Cook’s performance is viewed as impressive and unprecedented.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53760-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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
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