A singular and entertaining tech account.
A debut biography/memoir tells the story of Silicon Valley outlaw Captain Crunch.
Draper, once known by the pseudonym Captain Crunch, is most famous for inventing “the little blue box,” a homemade piece of phone-hacking equipment that allowed users to make calls anywhere in the world for free. (Two of the people he shared his invention with were youngsters Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who briefly manufactured and sold a version of the box.) But Draper’s career and influence went far beyond this early innovation of the Phone Phreak movement. Working as a contractor for the company that Jobs and Wozniak went on to found—a little outfit called Apple Computer, Inc.—Draper developed the first word processor. Later, as a thought leader of the internet privacy movement, he created the first working firewall. A prankster, rabble-rouser, and eventual activist, he landed himself in prison several times during the 1970s and ’80s for his hacking activities, leading many figures in Silicon Valley to hold him at a distance. With the help of Fraser, Draper is now telling his story for the first time: the inventions, the police busts, the parties, and the chance encounters in a world populated by tech entrepreneurs and countercultural freaks. Fraser’s frame narration, which is primarily set in the recent past and follows the composition of the book, is sharp and readable. But it is the sections narrated by Draper himself where the real meat is, even if these are rendered in his simple prose. Here he describes his activities after being released from jail one time: “We headed back up to San Jose. I had to report to my probation officer. I hooked up with Woz again when I got back up to Silicon Valley. He had built a few more complete Apple II prototypes.” The book’s self-aware structure and the prominence of Fraser as a character are peculiar choices, but a work about a figure as idiosyncratic as Draper is bound to be a bit odd. Anyone interested in the rise of the tech industry should be fascinated by the strange but influential role that Draper—Captain Crunch—played on its margins.
A singular and entertaining tech account.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 245
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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