The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley

Random House, 1999. Hardcover. Very GoodVery Good. Perhaps more than anywhere else, Silicon Valley in the latter part of the 2 0th century has come to represent the essence of the American dream. Its ec onomy has resembled the various rushes and booms of the 1800s. The Valley i s a unique place in a unique time, where just about anyone with a good idea , an aptitude for hard work, and a boatload of luck has a chance to make it big--really big. In The Nudist on the Late Shift, Po Bronson intends to ca pture the spirit of the Valley, leading us through a series of vignettes th at takes us from a "near brush with sudden wealth" to a $400 million buyout ; from life on the edge with a group of Java programmers to the plight of a futurist writer with the looming deadline for a 9,000-word article. For Br onson, the appeal of the Valley is this: Every generation that came before us had to make a choice in life between pursuing a steady career and pursui ng wild adventures. In Silicon Valley, that trade-off has been recircuited. By injecting mind-boggling risk into the once stodgy domain of gray-suited business, young people no longer have to choose. It's a two-for-one deal: the career path has become an adventure into the unknown. Like Tracy Kidder 's Soul of a New Machine, what makes Bronson's book work is a talent for na rrative. He presents compelling stories about those who make it--for exampl e, Ben Chiu (Killerapp.com, C/NET) and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail)--as well as those whom we'll never hear of again: the database salesman working on the "hockey stick" at the close of the quarter and the "kiss-ass entrepreneur" who's taken up COBOL programming to make ends meet. The Nudist on the Late.