[Review ⭐⭐⭐] Valley of Genius
A decent index for other great books to read
I just finished reading Adam Fisher’s Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom), and in a word, it was decent.
What made this book unique and interesting was not so much the content, but the way that it was presented: specifically, the narrative structure — there just isn’t one.
Whiplash
Fisher’s text is an assemblage of line-by-line quotations from individuals interviewed directly by Fisher, or by other members of the technology journalism community. Before reading it, I was not quite sure what to expect, given this structure could easily lend itself to participants being quoted out of context.
That said, it reads in a fair and seemingly honest manner, and while the weaving of many interviews together is done quite well considering the undertaking, it still gives the reader whiplash during the reading process. Despite already being familiar with many of the original tales of tech milestones referred to, I still found myself having to do too much context switching multiple times per page. It is an interesting structure for sure, which makes the book interesting more like a piece of “art” than it does as a book.
There is a companion podcast that features interviews with some of the names that appear in the book, and honestly, these are more enjoyable as they are not spliced line-by-line with other interviews. The continuous thread of thought on one topic from one person before moving to the next is a refreshing change from the text of the book. These interviews and stories would make for an excellent documentary.
I can appreciate the literal years of effort it must have taken to weave these thousands of hours of interviews into a coherent narrative structure that needs no surrounding writing, but it does not fully translate to value for the reader, which is unfortunate.
Some of the lesser known corners of history in technology
One of the more enjoyable parts of the book for me was that many of the names in these interviews are from folks that you typically do not hear about from other sources. Everyone knows every word Steve Jobs ever spoke, but what do you know about people such as Mike Slade and Charles Simonyi? Typically the story of Xerox PARC is told at its end in terms of what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were able to leverage to usher in the next era of computing, but a great amount of detail was given to the earlier stages. Napster is another great example of a company that is more often referred to in a footnote but gets a nice degree of coverage end-to-end here.
A good index for what else to read
Valley of Genius serves as a great outline for what other topics you should go read more deeply about. Find the genesis of the GUI interesting? Great, now you know to seek out more information on Doug Engelbart’s “The Mother of All Demos” and Xerox PARC. Want to know more about how Twitter began from the ashes of a podcast company? Great, Nick Bilton’s book should be in your Amazon cart by now. That said, the structure of the book makes it hard to digest for readers not already familiar with many of the facts, so who is it really for?
What Next?
So, what are these other books you should check out?
- for a general sweeping text like this but with a more coherent story to it, read: The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson
- for Apple, read: The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant AND Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- for Google, read: How Google Works by Eric Schmidt
- for Twitter, read: Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton
- for Atari (and the surrounding games industry), read: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier
- for Pixar, read: Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
Other canonical books on big tech companies that are not mentioned much in this book include:
- for Amazon, read: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
- for Airbnb/Uber, read: The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley are Changing the World by Brad Stone
- for Facebook, read: Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (and a bit of Netflix/Twitter in here too) by Antonio Garcia Martinez
What books did I miss? What should I read next (either on this topic of something completely different)?
Thanks for reading!
Blake <@b_t_walsh>
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