Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

by Kara Swisher Narrated by Kara Swisher

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"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. . . Bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking, just like its author, Burn Book sizzles."
—BOOKLIST (Starred Review)

“The most recognizable chronicler of the digital revolution.”
—WASHINGTON POST

“Nobody straddles the world of tech and media quite like Kara Swisher… This book isn’t just a juicy read, it’s also a valuable historical document, giving readers an inside look at the architects of some of the biggest tech moments of the last thirty years.”
—Charlotte Alter, TIME

“An exposé that also seeks to avert technological calamity on the perilous road still ahead.”
—ASSOCIATED PRESS

“Funny, smart, chic-y, and insightful.”
—Katie Couric

“Burn Book shows how understanding these leaders' pasts can illuminate their current motivations and aspirations.”
—AXIOS

“The queen of all media.”
—Walt Mossberg, former WALL STREET JOURNAL columnist

“Swisher has been the most entrepreneurial of reporters, both in the doggedness of her work and the ever-evolving array of venues where it’s manifested itself.”
—FAST COMPANY

“The book is also deeply personal and frankly, very moving.”
—Samantha Bee

“Unlike the mythological Cassandra whose prophecies were ignored, both the ‘children’ and adults will pay heed to [Kara Swisher’s] warnings.”
—THE DAILY BEAST

“As existential questions confront both the tech and media industries... Swisher takes no prisoners, offering readers a behind-the-curtain peek at the industry’s most powerful and ego-obsessed titans.”
—RELIABLE SOURCES

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2024-03-07
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159376510
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	02/27/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	310,944

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