A Whole New Life

Starred review from May 2, 1994
Novelist and poet Reynolds Price ( A Long and Happy Life ) here manages to turn his battle with spine cancer into a tough, sometimes funny, always moving and optimistic tale. His writing is eloquent enough to encompass his worst anguish; but his intellectual rigor, combined with religious convictions that never desert him, precludes self pity. Price now cheerfully calls himself ``a certified gimp, in working order.'' He was first diagnosed in 1984 and during the next four years had surgery, suffered continual and severe pain and became permanently confined to a wheelchair: ``My whole body felt caught in the threads of a giant hot screw and bolted inward to the point of screaming.'' He was heavily drugged and unable to function as either a writer or a friend. In 1987, he began treatment with hypnotist Patrick Logue of Duke University's psychiatric department with remarkable results: ``I instantly knew I was free in a way I'd never felt before in my life, surely not for a moment of the past three years.'' Price learned from Logue to manage his pain without drugs and is writing again: fiction, essays, movie and TV scripts and the affecting poems here. His book is for all who suffer. Through it, with utter simplicity, threads a testament to the power of prayer, which Price calls ``the first strong prop beneath my own collapse.'' He concludes ``I've lead a mainly happy life,'' and, more astonishingly, ``I know that this new life is better for me.'' What higher praise is there than to say we believe him?

November 1, 1993
Jobs, who with Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer and made the list of the Forbes 400 richest Americans, emerges as a mesmerizing, irrational, self-deluding and ultimately pathetic person in this portrait by the author of Bulls in the China Shop and Other Sino-American Business Encounters . Having been forced out of Apple in 1985, Jobs sought in vain to recover his ``boy wonder'' dominance in the ultra-competitive computer world through lavish spending on his new company, setting the tone early by paying a designer $100,000 to devise the name ``NeXT.'' With no market profiles clearly in mind, Jobs unilaterally chose a small, black, cube-shaped ``personal mainframe'' box, noncompatible and overpriced, to be the firm's sole hardware item with exclusive software applications--a ``retrograde'' posture, notes Stross. NeXT consistently fell far short of sales and production targets--while rivals Microsoft, Sun Systems and IBM forged ahead with innovations--to which Jobs responded with outrageously fanciful boasting at trade events and in the press. The book serves as an instructive case study of the power and peril of the computer industry. Photos not seen by PW .