While Internet stocks are ballooning, so are books about the players. Here’s a strong entry in the genre, savvy and clever.
The growing subspecialty of business books that deals with the brainiac talents and picaresque entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley is upgraded to version 2.0 with this knowledgeable communiqué from cyberspace.
Just as Hollywood is said to have done, Silicon Valley lures mature talent and young folk bright or attractive enough to cast hundreds of sitcoms. Novelist and Wired contributor Bronson (Bombardiers, 1995; The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, 1997) presents the wildcatters of the valley, from the seller of used cubicles to the multimillionaire who bedded down each night under his desk, from the devious headhunters to the young CEOs of software firms with killer apps. In a series of profiles, he probes their minds and hearts. We witness the closing days of an IPO (more dramatic than the preceding scutwork). Here, among the processors, terminals, modems, and servers are the individual progrananers, salespeople, venture capitalists, visionaries who build financial empires on vapor, and the new generation of studly geniuses who truly want to change the way the world operates. It just takes being first with one big idea. Here are the superachievers who risk all for exponential dollars. And here’s the nude guy, who is no urban legend. It’s all quite bizarre, of course, especially the money, which is “puppylike, untrained,” i.e., “it doesn’t behave commonsensically…People give money out here just to be part of the excitement of the deal.” The stories are told with vitality and more than a touch of gonzo. Though basic familiarity with the terminology might be nice, after reading this entertainment, you’ll think you understand the slang, the jargon, the gibberish, and the buzzwords of the valley.
While Internet stocks are ballooning, so are books about the players. Here’s a strong entry in the genre, savvy and clever.Pub Date: July 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50277-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1999
Damning data and persuasive arguments that should set some Communist knees a-knocking.
A freelance journalist and counsel to an American law firm in China predicts the imminent implosion of the economy and government of the People’s Republic of China.
Chang (who has lived in China for nearly 20 years) argues that the economy of China can no longer withstand the internal and external pressures for change. The greatest problem is the scandalous state of the country’s State Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Because the Communist cadres force the Chinese economy to conform to their archaic and procrustean social theories, the SOEs stagnate from lack of competition and suck ruinous loans from the state-owned banks, which are needed to underwrite such failing enterprises as petrochemicals, cement, steel, and electronics. The banks continue to function only because the Chinese are the world’s most thrifty people, saving about 40 percent of their incomes in bank accounts. Should public confidence in the system eventually erode (a probability, Chang argues), massive bank failures will inevitably follow. Chang also believes that China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) will accelerate its economic decline: no longer will the SOEs have monopolies on key industries, and if China fails to adhere to its agreements, dire consequences will ensue from its trading partners. Chang also considers the possibility—perhaps probability—of a war with Taiwan, a conflict the mainland cannot win, he says, if it employs only conventional forces and weapons. The immense potential for loss of life (and face), and the destruction of mainland property will exert on the Communist government pressures that it cannot sustain. Political corruption—pervasive in the country—is yet another force that may eventually send into the streets the masses of protestors whom the government fears. Chang documents his work heavily (with about 75 pages of endnotes), and his arguments carry the weight of his considerable experience and study. But he is often repetitive, and a shorter format might have served his purposes more effectively.
Damning data and persuasive arguments that should set some Communist knees a-knocking.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50477-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
Russia’s tailspin is by now a tale with some moss on it, but Brzezinski tells it with appealing dash and indispensable black...
A cool stroll down the mean streets of Novy Russky’s financial madness, under a rain of cynicism from former journalist Brzezinski.
Working as a stringer for the Wall Street Journal, Brzezinski poked about the backwaters of post-Soviet Russia and the republics before landing a job in the Moscow bureau. Returning to the capital after a five-year absence, he was dazzled by the wealth on display in the city, but he cast a more jaundiced eye on the sources of that wealth, from the big business of humanitarian relief-aid theft to the disastrous privatization of the nation’s resources (natural gas, oil, gold, diamonds, and aluminum are now all under the command of the banking oligarchy). The author tried to rustle up interest in big-money operators in Moscow (grasping bankers both native and foreign, the robber baroness Timoshenilo, the lord of privatization Anatoly Chubais), but the only remarkable thing about most of these characters (many of them former Party apparatchiks) is their wealth—and even Brzezinski’s caustic pokes can’t turn them into a good story. But when he returned to the provinces, he found the kind of natural resources that make for captivating reading, hiply told: a visit to a Russian submarine in Sevastapol, the wasteland of St. Petersburg as it makes a pathetic bid for the 2004 Olympics, the beyond-rough-and-tumble of the Far East energy business, and the dead zone around Chernobyl (where the grass is always greener—literally—thanks to the irradiated soil). And the story of his mugging in his Kiev apartment is riveting in its menace, although his description of its milieu—“the overflowing dumpster that formed the decorative centerpiece of our courtyard”—allows some comic relief.
Russia’s tailspin is by now a tale with some moss on it, but Brzezinski tells it with appealing dash and indispensable black humor.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86976-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
GENERAL BUSINESS | BUSINESS | ECONOMICS | WORLD | HISTORY
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