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
Here's another entry in the list of books about big, bad businesses. In this, the once credulous author takes a wrong turn on Wall Street, lands on a frenetic Merrill Lynch trading floor, and runs into a cabal of wheeler-dealers he calls a Latin Mafia. After a year, there's the inevitable exit interview. It's a story of job dissatisfaction in the extreme. With Harvard and the Navy on his rÇsumÇ, Stiles, of the Free State of Maryland, sought his fortune in the heady world of finance. That meant the capital of capitalism, New York. For him, specifically, it meant Merrill's emerging-markets group dealing in esoteric Third World debt instruments, and he had no notion of what they were. The world of high finance is one of young autodidacts. Rational training is rare; education depends on a skeptical attitude and a little reconnaissance. The reader can learn, along with the author, what a Brady bond is and how leverage on derivatives squeezed Orange County, Calif. Those with little interest in such arcana will nevertheless find entertainment in the cautionary tale of a young man's discovery of the hubris and naked mendacity emblematic of the warriors of Wall Street. Added to the cultural misfit at work, life in the Big Apple (Brooklyn, to be exact) was a disaster for Stiles, his loyal spouse, and his little dog, too. The big bucks didn't go very far and the Stileses were, in a funny set piece, manhandled in small claims court. Ultimately, though, it was a question of morals. Was the possibility of a seven-figure take-home worth all the compromises? In somewhat overwrought terms, the author, like a Boomer Hamlet, wrestled with the question. The answer came easily. He was fired. Stiles's view of the marketplace is fundamentally true, of course. Nicely written latter-day muckraking in a slick and entertaining debut.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8129-2789-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
Strahan's prose, over-salted with adverbs, bromides, and sweeping generalizations, is well suited to dishing an...
A real-life Confederacy of Dunces records the "dysfunctional corporate family'' history of a New Orleans institution, Lucky Dogs, Inc.
The company's hotdog-shaped vending carts are a French Quarter fixture; its motley crew of transient wienie vendors were the apparent inspiration for John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prizewinning farce. Strahan, a Lucky Dog vendor and manager intermittently since 1968, is the straight man among the clowns. He's a self-described "conservative redneck'' whose disapproval of gay lifestyles and unenviable position of authority over a constantly changing and largely unmanageable army of Ignatius J. Reillys lends his account of Big Easy street life (especially portions dealing with the quarter's randy days during the '60s and '70s) an air of censoriousness. The Lucky Dogs crew—restless drifters, Vietnam vets, drunks, small-time swindlers, transvestites, carnies, and the occasional college kid—suffer misadventures more pathetic than madcap. Strahan mediates their disputes with loan sharks, pimps, irate landlords, and jealous lovers with wearied aplomb, and his accounts of these confrontations are largely tributes to his own judiciousness and wisdom. He's obviously a man of character (more than once he rehires employees who previously skipped town with the day's receipts) and a heads-up businessman: When a four-star restaurant banishes a cart for stealing too many customers, Strahan asks for the request in writing, then threatens to run it as an ad in the local paper. He guides the company's expansion into New Orleans's casinos and overseas, eventually landing a spot at that haven of American street cuisine, Euro-Disney.
Strahan's prose, over-salted with adverbs, bromides, and sweeping generalizations, is well suited to dishing an entrepreneurial success story. But as an interpretive, first-person history of New Orleans's funky street life, Managing Ignatius can't cut the mustard.Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8071-2241-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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