Book: Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

Author: Kara Swisher

Published by: Piatkus

Price: Rs 799

San Francisco has mostly inspired an insipid literary genre of self-obsessed memoirs and crushingly boring digital policy treatises. But Burn Book, part memoir and mostly a front-seat view of tech’s ruling class, is an explosive read, for the most part, with Kara Swisher trying to decode the Silicon Valley art of producing more and more politically correct words to reveal less and less.

On the one hand, there are juicy anecdotes: the Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, and his then wife, Anne Wojcicki, had a baby shower where guests were asked: “Would you like a diaper? Or a onesie?” Then there are moments like Mark Zuckerberg’s agitation about his depiction in the then upcoming movie, The Social Network, because it “depicted him as having stolen the idea for the social network from his Harvard classmates, the Winklevoss brothers.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, Swisher scoops came every other week. She was one of the early newspaper journalists who understood the value of blogging. She ultimately embraced podcasts, onstage interviews (with the former The Wall Street Journal tech columnist, Walt Mossberg), and social media, inspiring young journalists in the process.

The book also captures the “optimistic pessimist” at her most vulnerable, like the experience of suffering a stroke before a conference in Hong Kong (she decided to test her speech by singing Oscar Mayer’s “My bologna has a first name” jingle in front of the mirror). Personal tidbits pepper the narrative too: she had a conversation with Jeff Bezos at a party at the gay portal, PlanetOut, in 1999 where he “peppered” her with “questions about how lesbians had children”. But such moments are few and far between.

The buzz-builders of Silicon Valley set the table for Swisher’s book but she doesn’t push the pen enough to go beyond an entertaining slice of the Internet era.