Valley of Genius

April 9, 2018
Former Wired contributor Fisher’s lively oral history of Silicon Valley focuses on behind-the-scene tales of major innovations that emerged from the tech hub, including the interactive video game, the personal computer, and the first computer-animated film. Through these stories emerges “the quintessential Silicon Valley script”: “Young kid with radical idea hacks together something cool, builds a wild free-wheeling company around it.” The conversational tone allows the reader to connect with the Valley’s eccentric and diverse cast of characters, including Napster founder Sean Parker, who helped launch Facebook; film director Ridley Scott, who created the television commercial for the first Macintosh computer; and programmer Jaron Lanier, who coined the term “virtual reality.” Touching on the personal habits of the industry’s titans—such as Steve Jobs’s quirky diets and Twitter cofounder Noah Glass’s propensity for giving colleagues “often painful” bear hugs—as well as the grueling process of turning ideas into viable products, Fisher captures the cultural lore of Silicon Valley in the voices of its more prominent players.

June 1, 2018
An oral history of Silicon Valley.Wired contributor Fisher, who grew up in the valley, debuts with an exhaustive gathering of the voices of the nerds, hippies, engineers, hackers, scientists, weirdos, and tech billionaires who invented the American future--from personal computers and video games to Google and Facebook--over several generations in the northern San Francisco Bay area. Based on more than 200 interviews and bristling with facts, personalities, and gossip, his inside account brings to life the "future obsessed and forward thinking" culture that gave life to our current digitized world. "Ready or not, computers are coming to the people," Stewart Brand told Rolling Stone in 1972. Already, Atari's Nolan Bushnell was creating video games, and the blending of hacker- and counter-culture was fostering a new popular culture among bright 20-somethings. Providing just enough context, Fisher wisely allows interviewees to tell their stories: of the pioneering Xerox PARC and Apple's Macintosh; of the virtual community the WELL and the short-lived General Magic (with its early iPhone); of Pixar Netscape and the eBay experiment. In the mid-1990s, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin "looked like a bunch of kids...screwing around," says Deadhead Charlie Ayers, their chef. Throughout the narrative, we meet shoeless programmers and watch water-gun fights; attend wild parties and hacker conferences; witness the inception of innumerable startups; and hear debates on everything from power to the people to IPOs as a stream of entrepreneurs, including Twitter's "nose-ring-wearing, tattooed, neck-bearded, long-haired punk hippie misfits," recall the beginnings of the cyberculture. There is much nostalgia: "We were younger then, and we thought it would go on forever," says Buck's Restaurant owner Jamis MacNiven, of the pre-dot-com crash days. While focusing on the valley's cultural influence, this colorful history also describes emblematic moments from the lives of ambitious movers and shakers, including long walks with Apple's Steve Jobs and young Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's famous party exclamation: "Domination!"An immensely readable account of America's wild cauldron of innovation.

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May 15, 2018

After conducting over 200 in-depth interviews, Fisher offers an insider's view of Silicon Valley, starting with the advent of the personal computer. Fisher's journalism has appeared in venues such as Wired and MIT Technology Review, and, what's more, he actually grew up in Silicon Valley.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2018

In his first book, technology journalist Fisher weaves first-person accounts of Silicon Valley's history as an incubator of computer culture and commerce. A bit of an unconventional oral history, this book contains separate interviews that are compiled alongside quotations from speeches or other print publications. While undoubtedly losing some of the give-and-take and triggered memories of a group interview, it does allow for a more cohesive chronological and thematic arrangement, since many of the key players were involved in Silicon Valley for decades with different companies. Starting with Stanford, Atari, Xerox PARC, and Apple, the hardware, software, and ancillary corporate culture and publications fostered in these San Francisco suburbs are remembered and analyzed by those on the front lines. Later chapters chronicle the rise of the web, the dot com financing boom and bust, and the corporate cultures of Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The "uncensored" of the subtitle mostly refers to the drama of large personalities interacting and a pervasive drug culture. VERDICT This behind-the-scenes account of modern start-up culture will interest technology geeks and business historians alike.--Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.