Burn Book, Kara Swisher
Burn Book, Kara Swisher
4 Rating(s)
List: $23.99 | Sale: $15.83
Club: $11.99

Burn Book
A Tech Love Story

Bestseller

Author: Kara Swisher

Narrator: Kara Swisher

Unabridged: 8 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/27/2024


Synopsis

Now including a new afterword!

An instant New York Times bestseller from award-winning journalist Kara Swisher, Burn Book is a “highly readable…bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking” (Booklist, starred review) account of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. From “the queen of all media” (Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal), this is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

When tech titans crowed that they would “move fast and break things,” Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering 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 once observe: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’”

While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became 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.

Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovations 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 of 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 heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.

About Kara Swisher

Kara Swisher is the host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher and the cohost of the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway, both distributed by New York magazine. She was also the cofounder and editor-at-large of Recode, host of the Recode Decode podcast, and coexecutive producer of the Code conference. She was a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and host of its Sway podcast and has also worked for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Burn Book is her third book.


Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by billyjk on 2025-03-10 10:05:35

I have followed Kara for years and have always enjoyed her candid, honest and insightful takes on tech. I found this book to have a singular, off-topic focus that was a consistent drone. Dropped it half-way through. Couldn't make it through. Too bad.

Goodreads review by E.R.

The greatest technology reporter of the age adds to her legacy with a thoughtful, funny, and essential review of her years dissecting Silicon Valley lunacy for us. For fans of her work (including me, for sure), we get a greatest hits book with her additional acerbic content as she dresses down the p......more

Goodreads review by Neville

I really wanted to like this. But there wasn't a lot of new info here, especially if you've followed Kara's work for a while. Most times I felt like it was collation of multiple opinion blog posts rather than a cohesive story.......more

I really enjoy Kara Swisher’s podcasts. This book is kind of a general history of modern tech with some personal anecdotes. The tone of the book feels strangely arrogant, like she knows better than all of these brilliant tech revolutionaries. Maybe should have been called Brag Book? ;)......more

Goodreads review by Lucas

It’s fine. There’s pretty much nothing new in it. If you listen to pivot, or have even marginally followed Kara’s career, save your money.......more


Quotes

"Journalist Kara Swisher specializes in reporting on the Internet. Here she narrates her memoir with urgency and focus, providing a you-are-there history of Silicon Valley. With more than a decade of podcasting experience, Swisher has developed a well-honed, rapid-fire delivery; an aura of journalistic integrity; and a firsthand knowledge of tech history. Anecdotes abound on such topics as discussing the intricacies of lesbian pregnancy with Jeff Bezos and trying to encourage Mark Zuckerberg to remove his sweat-drenched hoodie during a public interview. There are plenty of reveals about the fake-it-til-you-make-it individuals who built tech culture. More importantly, Swisher serves as the Valley's outlier conscience—fearful of the future and optimistically pessimistic."