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THE THIRD WAVE

AN ENTREPRENEUR'S VISION OF THE FUTURE

Opportunity beckons, and Case ably describes the possibilities, but the price of the chase may harm as well as benefit.

The founder of America Online outlines some of the potentialities he sees emerging in the “Internet of Everything.”

Case now invests in startups through his company, Revolution, but he also served as chairman of AOL-Time Warner and was the founding chair of President Barack Obama's Startup America Partnership. This veteran of the earliest generation of Internet architects—along with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, and others—still seems well-qualified to forecast what's ahead. He offers his own business history, primarily based in marketing and dealmaking (at both Procter & Gamble and Pizza Hut), as evidence that he knows the ropes. He identifies three sectors of economic activity as foci of the coming “Third Wave” of the Internet: health care, education, and food production, processing, and transportation. Each of these represents a partnership between government and the private sector aimed at achieving some public good. Case puts himself forward as a facilitator for future entrepreneurs to find their ways through the related labyrinths of political disputes and regulatory entanglement. “Successful engagement with government will be difficult, and it will take a willingness to listen, a foundation of respect, and a lot of patience,” he writes. “But it can work. It has worked. I know from experience.” Case’s vision of the future is compelling, but he may be overreaching when he emphasizes functions for third-party apps that could undermine professionally qualified expertise and challenge employment, earnings, and benefits. Case sees such apps being able to track the health care data of individuals. The danger is that they make use of previous public investment in the Internet to undermine existing regulatory structures and labor practices. New labor legislation will need to be overhauled, he writes, in order to make the envisioned changes possible.

Opportunity beckons, and Case ably describes the possibilities, but the price of the chase may harm as well as benefit.

Pub Date: April 5, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-3258-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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