An entertaining chronicle of creativity, luck, and unflagging perseverance.
The rocky road from startup to colossal success.
Randolph, co-founder of Netflix, makes an engaging book debut with a candid memoir recounting the history of the company as it evolved “from dream to concept to shared reality.” After co-founding the magazine MacUser and working in direct marketing for a software giant, Randolph, eager to work for himself, had been coming up with new business concepts (e.g., personalized dog food) when he hit on the idea of renting videotapes. When his friend Reed Hastings, looking to fund a new company, expressed mild interest, Randolph gathered a dozen “brilliant, creative people” to see if the idea made sense financially. Videotapes, it turned out, were prohibitively expensive to mail, but the upcoming new technology of DVDs seemed viable. Inventing a name for the new company (NowShowing and CinemaCenter were possibilities) was the least of their problems: Only by contracting with Toshiba and Sony to offer free rentals with the purchase of a DVD player did they entice customers, but even then, sales of DVDs were stronger than rentals. For a few years, the company was “almost always on the razor’s edge between total success and total failure.” When individual rentals failed to put the company on secure footing, Randolph and his team came up with the idea of a monthly subscription service with no late fees, a move that proved popular. Yet even with 200,000 subscribers, Netflix still lost money and was forced to trim its staff; the layoffs, writes the author, were painful. Besides internal changes, the company looked for alliances with more successful enterprises, but a deal with Amazon (it would sell DVDs and steer customers to Netflix for rentals) collapsed and a hopeful bid for Blockbuster to buy Netflix fizzled. Elevating Hastings to CEO helped to lure investors, and after “years of work, thousands of hours of brainstorms, dire finances, and an impatient CEO,” Netflix went public in 2002. Now with 150 million subscribers, Netflix has morphed into a media behemoth.
An entertaining chronicle of creativity, luck, and unflagging perseverance.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-53020-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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