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 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
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