Essential for aspiring entrepreneurs, to say nothing of those looking for a view of how the modern, speed-of-light world...
Richly detailed, swiftly moving work of modern business history, recounting a truly world-changing technology and the people who made it possible.
It began with an invention, then a revolt. The invention owes to three physicists, who, just after World War II, developed a replacement for the vacuum tube. “Neolithic-looking in its first incarnation,” the semiconductor had countless uses, and it immediately made fortunes for all concerned—except for those three physicists. Writes longtime Silicon Valley watcher Malone (The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory, 2012, etc.), one of them, William Shockley, resenting that fact, set up his own manufacturing firm. The trouble was, no one who had ever encountered him wanted to work with him, forcing him to recruit far outside the usual Caltech/Bell Labs fold. That introduction of new blood was certainly good. It was also bad, however, since Shockley—later to become infamous for his inflammatory pronouncements on race—really and truly was detestable. This all set the innovative trio of Noyce, Moore and Grove on the way to establishing Intel. Noyce got things going as founding CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor; his confidence, Malone writes, “would play a key role in making Fairchild, and later Intel, look far bigger than it really was.” It didn’t hurt to have Moore, the far-seeing technologist and coiner of Moore’s law—which Malone invokes like a mantra perhaps one too many times—and Grove, another shrewd master of the market, along for the ride. Malone has his technological history down cold, though sometimes it can be a little daunting, as when he discusses the fraught business of developing the silicon gate, bootstrapping “each gate atop its partner transistor, something heretofore considered impossible.” Fortunately, the author discusses that complex technology within the context of commerce, broadening its appeal to the business audience as well.
Essential for aspiring entrepreneurs, to say nothing of those looking for a view of how the modern, speed-of-light world came to be.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-222676-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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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