We had a party. It was good. So good that I have only just recovered enough to blog about it.
Michael Lewis’s book The New New Thing tells the story of James Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon and myCFO. More accurately, it tells the tell of James Clark trying to programme his boat Hyperion, while in his spare time becoming a billionaire.
It is a strange story. Clark is almost certainly something special having made a huge amount of money with all this companies. He saw the future again and again. And he capitalised on this without actually making proper businesses.
Silicon Graphics was a business success. However, Netscape never was and was ultimately flogged to AOL (for shares) while Healtheon is a company I had not even heard of and had to look up on Wikipedia. There there is a short article to be found about how it merged with WebMD.
Clark’s skill seems to be creating an idea and giving it a spectacular IPO without ever really building a business. And he is very, very good at it.
I am a big fan of Steinbeck. While Of Mice and Men was enjoyable, it was The Grapes of Wrath that truly sold me on his writing. I do not consider myself that well read, but if you said you had you were and had concluded Grapes of Wrath was the best novel ever, I would find that totally believable. His graphic deception and insisting of emotion and hopelessness has been surpassed by no other book I had read.
It was for this reason that I picked up East of Eden.
Given the success of his earlier work, it seemed odd to discover that Steinbeck believed that everyone has one great novel in them – and that East of Eden was his.
I am glad nobody really asked me what it was about in my first few weeks reading it. The truth is I had no clue. It wasn’t about something notable like the Great Depression. It was just about life. Life in Salinas Valley, particularly the life of two families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks.
Is it Steinbeck’s finest work? That I am not sure. However, I did enjoy reading it just as much as any of his other work.
