Burn Book: A Tech Romance

Kara Swisher, the award-winning journalist and OG chronicler of Silicon Valley, has penned a witty, scathing, yet fair account of the tech industry and its founders in her Instant New York Times Bestseller. "Bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking, just like its author, Burn Book sizzles," as described by Booklist in a starred review.

This book, part memoir and part history, is a necessary chronicle of tech's most powerful players. Swisher, known as "the queen of all media" by Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal, provides an inside story that we've all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

While tech titans touted the mantra of "move fast and break things," Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. As she covered 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 observe, "It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, 'I hope Kara never sees this.'"

Swisher's journey began while she was still in college, when she got her start at The Washington Post, becoming 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.

Over the course of three decades, Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech, 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 core, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone. Kara Swisher's Burn Book is a necessary and compelling read for anyone interested in understanding the evolution of the digital world and the powerful players who have shaped it.

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