Much of this book is an extended footnote to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, which, though not without problems, is the...
Can Apple, though socking away billions in sales of iPhones and iPads, be the disruptor and industry leader of old? Without the radical sensibilities of Steve Jobs, it seems unlikely.
According to former Wall Street Journal and Reuters reporter Kane, the last three years of Apple’s existence have been less than inspiring. It’s not that CEO Tim Cook is a poor leader: The late Steve Jobs, the true visionary behind the company, handpicked him for his abilities, and if he’s not a world-changer, Cook is at least stable. (Apparently, to trust Kane, he also shares Jobs’ talent for summoning up vein-bulging, free-floating rage at the slightest provocation.) Though Kane dwells too much on Apple as it was when Jobs lived, she points to some ongoing problems that Jobs might have dealt with differently from Cook: for one, the appalling conditions under which Apple products are made in Chinese plants, and for another, the reputation-diminishing release of not-ready-for-prime-time products such as Maps and Siri (“Siri’s problems may not have been Cook’s fault, but how had he allowed the same pattern to repeat itself with maps, which fell squarely under his watch?”). Overall, it seems self-evident that without Jobs’ peculiar blend of devotion to both technological superiority and sheer beauty, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s view is the correct one: Apple “will not be nearly so successful because he’s gone.” Yet, by an accident of timing, Kane’s book anticipates but largely misses the buoying success of iOS 7, Mavericks, the latest iteration of the iPhone, the iPad Air and other products that have kept Apple’s fortunes from sliding as dramatically as Microsoft’s after Bill Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000.
Much of this book is an extended footnote to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, which, though not without problems, is the first work to consult when thinking of things Apple.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-212825-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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