An entertaining read but 20 years too late.
A behind-the-scenes look at the rise and eventual plateauing of Novell, one of the stars of the microcomputing era.
White presents a readable account of how this unusual company, largely run by Mormons from a small town in Utah, invented the local area network (LAN) and grew into a worldwide information-technology powerhouse. There are little-known facts, such as the odd way the company got its name. The wife of one of the founders thought the name should be “Novell.” Her husband thought it meant “new” in French, but the other founder said then it should correctly be spelled “nouveau” or “nouvelle.” Interestingly, they both decided to leave it as is. There is the back story about how the company created its flagship product, NetWare. Management’s dissatisfaction with its slow-selling terminal computer and desire to split a hard disk among several terminal computer units led to the development of a local area network, and Novell created the software to support it. There is political intrigue as Craig Burton and Judith Clarke, two of the company’s top leaders, leave the company after learning of a “management review” by Novell president Ray Noorda, who names another long-time employee as his successor. White does a fine job relating the ups and downs of a company beset by the problems typical of a high-growth, high-tech startup going through a tumultuous evolution driven by changes in technology and management mishaps. The book is well-written and entertaining, keeping the reader engaged in the story of Novell. However, this is very old news, presenting a historical perspective on a single company that may be too narrow and outdated for most readers. The book is likely to interest students of the early days of the personal computer, or information-technology junkies who are curious about how Novell got its start. But for the average reader, the work may come across as a nostalgic look back that is of limited interest.
An entertaining read but 20 years too late.Pub Date: July 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452023038
Page Count: 242
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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