Michael Lewis was supposed to be writing about how Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, was going to turn health care on its ear by launching Healtheon, which would bring the vast majority of the industry's transactions online. So why was he spending so much time on a computerized yacht, each feature installed because, as one technician put it, "someone saw it on Star Trek and wanted one just like it?" Much of The New New Thing, to be fair, is devoted to the Healtheon story. It's just that Jim Clark doesn't do startups the way most people do. "He had ceased to be a businessman," as Lewis puts it, "and become a conceptual artist." After coming up with the basic idea for Healtheon, securing the initial seed money, and hiring the people to make it happen, Clark concentrated on the building of Hyperion, a sailboat with a 197-foot mast, whose functions are controlled by 25 SGI workstations (a boat that, if he wanted to, Clark could log onto and steer--from anywhere in the world). Keeping up with Clark proves a monumental challenge--"you didn't interact with him," Lewis notes, "so much as hitch a ride on the back of his life"--but one that the author rises to meet with the same frenetic energy and humor of his previous books, Liar's Poker and Trail Fever.
Like those two books, The New New Thing shows how the pursuit of power at its highest levels can lead to the very edges of the surreal, as when Clark tries to fill out an investment profile for a Swiss bank, where he intends to deposit less than .05 percent of his financial assets. When asked to assess his attitude toward financial risk, Clark searches in vain for the category of "people who sought to turn ten million dollars into one billion in a few months" and finally tells the banker, "I think this is for a different ... person." There have been a lot of profiles of Silicon Valley companies and the way they've revamped the economy in the 1990s--The New New Thing is one of the first books fully to depict the sort of man that has made such companies possible. --Ron Hogan
From Library Journal
Acclaimed journalist Lewis does for Silicon Valley in the Nineties what his previous best seller, Liar's Poker, did for Wall Street in the Eighties. The book is threefold in scope. First, it offers an insightful look at the life and career of Dr. Jim Clark, the eccentric but brilliant visionary who thus far has created three multi-billion-dollar ground-breaking enterprises--Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon. Second, it gives an insider's look at how the concept of the "new new thing" has been translated into an actionable product by key players in the game. Finally, it presents a social history of Silicon Valley, which has become the primary driver for worldwide social, economic, and political change. Although a little slow at times, this book is a great read and tells a compelling story. Highly recommended for both academic and public libraries.
---Norman B. Hutcherson, Beale Memorial Lib., Bakersfield, CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Lewis, in his eye-opening and best-selling Liar's Poker (1989), told tales on himself: about his meteoric rise from trainee at Salomon Brothers investment firm to very successful trader. Now he tells tales on someone else: Jim Clark, who created Netscape and thus "triggered the Internet boom." To write this profile, Lewis more or less shadowed Clark for a while, and dogging him meant participating in Clark's transatlantic journey in his obsessively designed, totally computerized sailing ship, Hyperion. Lewis' book, in effect, provides a look at the whole computer industry, for the more we learn about Clark, the more we learn about the industry as a whole. Silicon Valley, referred to as "the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet," is the Wall Street of the 1990s, and Clark is a primary mover and shaker. He is strictly an idea man, coming up with new ideas of how to make millions and leaving his engineers to arrive at workable details. Clark, as we follow and marvel at his career, invents his life as he goes along. What drives him is his abiding need to pursue new concepts and experiences. He is protypical of the superwealthy leadership in Silicon Valley: "the geek holed up in his basement all weekend discovering new things to do with his computer." That's the point of the Silicon Valley computer industry: people don't have to build new computers to make a fortune, they just have to devise new things for the computer to do. This book will prove very popular, not only with readers interested in business and computers but also with those who are simply curious about "the new new thing." Brad Hooper
Review
"The most significant business story since the days of Henry Ford... Lewis achieves a novelistic elegance."
― Boston Globe
"It is a splendid, entirely satisfying book, intelligent and fun and revealing and troubling in the correct proportions, resolutely skeptical but not at all cynical..."
― Kurt Andersen, The New York Times Book Review
"[R]emarkable....Clark proves to be a character as enthralling as any in American fiction or non-fiction....Lewis tells a great story in this book, with prose that ranges from the beautiful to the witty to the breathtaking."
― Fred Moody, Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.
New Growth Theory argued, in abstruse mathematics, that wealth came from the human imagination.Highlighted by 545 Kindle readers
