Washington Post
tech reporter Henry's first book is a lively account of a billionaire boys club—members include Netscape's Marc Andreessen and AOL's Steve Case—whose purpose was to establish Washington, D.C., as a center of Internet activity. Henry attended the monthly dinners, during which startup CEOs wooed the group, who then nonchalantly voted whether to invest truckloads of cash—"thumbs up or thumbs down" like "the lions and the Christians." The book is ultimately a meditation on the nature of oligarchy during these dizzying times. The titans prove surprisingly fallible, combining the quixotic hope of transformative change while repressing the underlying harsh fiscal reality. Egotistical, greedy, petty, pretentious, grandiose and arrogant, the executives ultimately wanted to overhaul the entire world for the better and fell woefully short of that laudable goal. While the book usefully humanizes these tycoons, it also caters to the ordinary reader's schadenfreude, as the executives glumly watch their paper fortunes dissipate, concoct "Armageddon situations" and undertake "wealth preservation" (a euphemism for curtailing heedless squandering). The book is riotous and riveting, but not flawless. Henry too often leaves readers hankering for more information, and the book's chronology is sometimes irritatingly out of whack. Still, this brisk and incisive account combines the furtive thrill of restricted access with an outsider's detached reflection. Agent, Jan Miller. (Nov. 7)
Forecast:This book may not quite have the verve or polish of Michael Lewis's
Liar's Poker or
The New New Thing, but it's a worthy successor to that territory. After the flood of dot-com memoirs, the uniqueness of Henry's top-down view shouldn't be underestimated.
