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Title details for The Valley of the Gods by Alexandra Wolfe - Available

The Valley of the Gods

A Silicon Valley Story

by Alexandra Wolfe
Arden Hammersmith
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
Reporter Alexandra Wolfe's biting but admiring story of Silicon Valley, and the men and women whose hubris and ambition are changing the world.
Each year, young people from around the world go to Silicon Valley to hatch an idea, start a company, strike it rich, and become powerful and famous. In "a jauntily paced anthropological look at Northern California's techtopia" (Bloomberg Businessweek), reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal Alexandra Wolfe follows three of these upstarts who have "stopped out" of college and real life in the hopes of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.

Meet the billionaires who go to training clubs for thirty-minute "body slams" designed to fit in with the start-up schedule; attend parties where people devour peanut butter-and-jelly sushi rolls; and date and seduce in a romantic culture in which thick glasses, baggy jeans, and a t-shirt is the costume of any sex symbol (and where a jacket and tie symbolize mediocrity). Through Wolfe's eyes, we discover how they date and marry, how they dress and live, how they plot and dream, and how they have created a business world and an economic order that has made us all devotees of them.

In her blistering and hysterical examination of this new ruling class, Wolfe "offers a revealing peek inside the privilege, power, and profligacy of Silicon Valley" (Town & Country). Valley of the Gods "captures the absurdity of this brave new world, pierces the hype, but also conveys the dreams and the passions that can shape a world's economy" (USA TODAY).

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 10, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781508231769
      • File size: 180876 KB
      • Duration: 06:16:49

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 12, 2016
      Wall Street Journal reporter Wolfe’s debut zeroes in on a subculture of Silicon Valley’s youngest entrepreneurs, recipients of the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program funded by Paypal founder Peter Thiel who doles out 100,000 grants to people under the age of 20 so they can “drop out of school and head to Silicon Valley.” The book loosely follows the first class of fellows through the experiences of Jonathan Burnham, a teen with a dream of mining heavy metals from asteroids, who was awarded the fellowship in 2011. Through Burnham’s story, readers are introduced to world of dorm-like housing, home to an assortment of oddballs who subsist on weird diets and seek ways to never die. Wolfe provides a lighthearted, at times funny, view of Silicon Valley filled with chatty prose and throwaway comments about investors who are more interested in taking women on dates then backing their technologies. Wolfe rarely addresses the underbelly of this California playscape, touching only briefly on issues such as gender discrimination.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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