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TROUBLEMAKERS

Name: TROUBLEMAKERS
Author: Leslie Berlin
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5150-8

SILICON VALLEY'S COMING OF AGE

by Leslie Berlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2017

A sturdy, skillfully constructed work of business and technological history.

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Looking back on Silicon Valley’s early years, when magic was brewing in the suburbs of the Bay Area.

Steve Jobs may have received most of the narrative oxygen coming out of Silicon Valley for the last quarter-century or so, with Elon Musk a close successor. However, as New York Times technology columnist Berlin (Project Historian/Stanford Univ. Silicon Valley Archives; The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, 2005, etc.) writes in this vigorous account, the first days were the hardest—and, all in all, involved the most interesting players. At the center of her narrative is Bob Taylor, a sometimes-prickly computer scientist who “kick-started the precursor to the Internet, the Arpanet.” Though employed by Xerox for years, Taylor was committing to breaking “the stranglehold of mainframe computing” and evangelized for the vast possibilities of personal computers. Others picked up on his vision even as Taylor eventually broke with Xerox and early adapters discovered the many difficulties inherent in creating a useful PC. Mike Markkula, for one, worked quietly as Apple chairman to raise the quality and look of its products. “Markkula placed a high priority on first impressions,” writes Berlin, “so high that Jobs would later say that it was Markkula who taught him to do the same.” It’s noteworthy, as the author notes, that Markkula’s departure saw Apple grow increasingly lost in the wilderness throughout much of the 1980s and ’90s. Some of the other visionaries Berlin profiles include Sandra Kurtzig, the pioneering entrepreneur who was the first woman CEO to take a Silicon Valley company public, and Al Alcorn, who masterminded the video game “Pong.” Others earn less space but are no less influential, such as HP president John Young, who predicted in 1980 that Silicon Valley would replace manufacturing with research, thus making it the domain of “highly skilled professionals who can afford to live here”—which, of course, is just how things turned out.

A sturdy, skillfully constructed work of business and technological history.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4516-5150-8

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017

Categories:

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | BUSINESS | GENERAL BUSINESS

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

Categories:

- SEEN & HEARD
Bill Gates Shares His Summer Reading List

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THE RIGHT STUFF

by Tom Wolfe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 1979

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Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.

But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.

But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.