Essential for aspiring entrepreneurs, to say nothing of those looking for a view of how the modern, speed-of-light world...
Richly detailed, swiftly moving work of modern business history, recounting a truly world-changing technology and the people who made it possible.
It began with an invention, then a revolt. The invention owes to three physicists, who, just after World War II, developed a replacement for the vacuum tube. “Neolithic-looking in its first incarnation,” the semiconductor had countless uses, and it immediately made fortunes for all concerned—except for those three physicists. Writes longtime Silicon Valley watcher Malone (The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory, 2012, etc.), one of them, William Shockley, resenting that fact, set up his own manufacturing firm. The trouble was, no one who had ever encountered him wanted to work with him, forcing him to recruit far outside the usual Caltech/Bell Labs fold. That introduction of new blood was certainly good. It was also bad, however, since Shockley—later to become infamous for his inflammatory pronouncements on race—really and truly was detestable. This all set the innovative trio of Noyce, Moore and Grove on the way to establishing Intel. Noyce got things going as founding CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor; his confidence, Malone writes, “would play a key role in making Fairchild, and later Intel, look far bigger than it really was.” It didn’t hurt to have Moore, the far-seeing technologist and coiner of Moore’s law—which Malone invokes like a mantra perhaps one too many times—and Grove, another shrewd master of the market, along for the ride. Malone has his technological history down cold, though sometimes it can be a little daunting, as when he discusses the fraught business of developing the silicon gate, bootstrapping “each gate atop its partner transistor, something heretofore considered impossible.” Fortunately, the author discusses that complex technology within the context of commerce, broadening its appeal to the business audience as well.
Essential for aspiring entrepreneurs, to say nothing of those looking for a view of how the modern, speed-of-light world came to be.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-222676-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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