Burn book : a tech love story /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Instant New York Times Bestseller

From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.

"Swisher, the bad-ass journalist and OG chronicler of Silicon Valley...takes no prisoners in this highly readable look at the evolution of the digital world...Bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking, just like its author, Burn Book sizzles" ( Booklist , starred review).

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech's most powerful players. From "the queen of all media" (Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal ), this is the inside story we've all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

When tech titans crowed that they would "move fast and break things," Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of "listening in the heating ducts" and prompted Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg to once observe: "It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, 'I hope Kara never sees this.'"

While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post , where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering the nascent Internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal , joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news sites.

Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovation that has both helped and hurt our world. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few whom Swisher made sweat--figuratively and, in Zuckerberg's case, literally.

Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech's potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue: Sheeple Who Need Sheeple (1)
• Chapter 1 Babylon Was (13)
• Chapter 2 Before the Gold Rush (29)
• Chapter 3 California, Here I Came (47)
• Chapter 4 Search Me (63)
• Chapter 5 The Mongoose (79)
• Chapter 6 The End of the Beginning (95)
• Chapter 7 The Golden God (111)
• Chapter 8 Sillywood (129)
• Chapter 9 The Most Dangerous Man (147)
• Chapter 10 The Uber Mensch (165)
• Chapter 11 Staying Vertical (181)
• Chapter 12 Good Bones (197)
• Chapter 13 I, Asshole (215)
• Chapter 14 The Mensches (239)
• Chapter 15 Pivoting (257)
• Chapter 16 Come With Me If You Want to Live (277)
• Notes (299)
• Acknowledgments (301)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Booklist Review

Swisher, the bad-ass journalist and OG chronicler of Silicon Valley and its denizens (almost all of them male because, well, tech world), takes no prisoners in this highly readable look at the evolution of the digital world. She's covered all the boldfaced names, many from the early days of their careers: Gates, Thiel, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and Musk, as well as lesser-knowns who have still become billionaires thanks to their start-ups, successful or not. She spills so much tea that several napkins will be needed to mop it all up. But there is so much more here; Swisher takes a hard look at both current and future technology and how its impact on global society has escaped the hands of those who designed it and is certainly beyond the reach of those in power who (mostly don't) regulate it. Having studied propaganda in college, she is particularly wary about the ramifications of social media as it continues to eat the news. And while Swisher's story of her own rise sometimes feels like background, there are important lessons here for women looking for guideposts as they make their own way. Bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking, just like its author, Burn Book sizzles.

Kirkus Book Review

An essential explanation of how tech has changed the world, from a truth-teller who has witnessed it at close range. Years ago, someone interviewing Swisher for an internship told her she was too confident. Her reply: "I'm not too confident, I'm fantastic. Or I will be." It could be annoying, but most readers will agree with her. Swisher, who began as a journalist covering the rise of the internet and has since become a thought leader via conferences, publications, podcasts, and an opinion column in the New York Times, offers an account of her career that is fun to read, enlightening, and sometimes frightening. She's been ahead of her time since the 1990s, when she supported a colleague in lodging a then-unheard-of sexual harassment complaint against talk show host John McLaughlin, and she has a clear talent for "scenario building, which is a fancy way of saying I'm a good guesser." This is evident in her narration of the rise and fall of companies from AOL to Uber and the careers of "man-boys" like Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and many more. With regard to social media, Swisher writes that "engagement equals enragement," and she predicted the Jan. 6 insurrection; in fact, she posed it as a hypothetical to see if Twitter would kick Trump off the platform. The tech world, she writes, is a "mirrortocracy, full of people who like their own reflection so much that they only saw value in those that looked the same," people who "ignored issues of safety not because they were necessarily awful, but because they had never felt unsafe a day in their lives." Though the book lives up to its title with scathing portraits of jerks and gross excesses, one of the most memorable aspects is Swisher's deep respect for Steve Jobs, whom she laments as one of a kind. Swisher for president. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Kara Swisher is the host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher and the cohost of the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway, both distributed by New York magazine. She was also the cofounder and editor-at-large of Recode , host of the Recode Decode podcast, and coexecutive producer of the Code conference. She was a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and host of its Sway podcast and has also worked for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post . Burn Book is her third book.