A well-researched, up-to-date story about a fight to define one famous company’s future.
The inside story of the cult of personality that surrounds the leadership of Silicon Valley’s technology behemoths.
Business Insider chief correspondent Carlson’s complex study of Yahoo’s spectacular rise and turbulent fall is less gossipy than Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires (2009) and more accurate than that book’s adaptation, The Social Network, but it does carry that same strange feeling that it’s hard to believe these bizarre events transpired in one of the world’s largest companies. The first section recaps Yahoo’s rise while offering a parallel portrait of a shy 24-year-old engineer who became nearly indispensable to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. There’s even a cameo by Mark Zuckerberg, who brazenly demanded $1 billion from Yahoo for Facebook in 2006. There’s also a reference to “Project Godfather,” an early attempt to wipe out other search firms from the market, and the story of CEO Carole Bartz, who was fired over the phone. The remainder of the book focuses on the aforementioned engineer, Marissa Mayer, who was handed the reins of the multibillion-dollar company at the age of 37, with no practical experience managing finances, human resources or global operations. Operating under the safety of Yahoo’s major investment in China’s Amazon-like site Alibaba, Mayer transformed from Yahoo’s savior to a CEO under siege, criticized by employees suffering under an arcane review system, under pressure from her board to fire thousands of people, and possibly running out of time to turn the company around. “If turning around a company is like building a bridge in the middle of a war zone, with bombs dropping out of the sky every minute, then Marissa Mayer was the lucky army engineer who got to build a bridge from Yahoo’s past to Yahoo’s future under perfect air cover—air cover provided by Alibaba,” writes the author in this page-turning account, which is thankfully light on jargon.
A well-researched, up-to-date story about a fight to define one famous company’s future.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-5661-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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