Book description
The true, unvarnished history of the town at the heart of Silicon Valley.
Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Palo Alto as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Malcolm Harris is a brilliant thinker in the tradition of the radical writer, whose books are always deeply researched, fearlessly polemical, and highly relevant. His previous books talked about millennials, Occupy Wall Street, and growing inequality.
This new book is a magisterial and incredibly ambitious work of nonfiction that focuses on Palo Alto and then zooms out from there to explain the formation of the contemporary economy, including but not limited to the modern-day tech industry. Full of fascinating stories and shocking insights.
From Wendy's list on critical perspective on the tech industry.
This is the story of how and where the tech bro mindset was born. I was at first intimidated by the size of this thing and the breadth of its subtitle. But Harris manages to explain how the ethos of Palo Alto was forged long ago in a system of horse breeding that has carried through to the way startups are funded, evaluated, and shed today.
What I liked about it most were the stories of the people who developed this strange part of the country and how all of them contributed to what is now unquestioned: the Silicon Valley…
From Douglas' list on understanding how tech billionaires think.
If you love Palo Alto...
These Blue Mountains
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
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