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Burn Book

A Tech Love Story

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Burn Book

Written by: Kara Swisher
Narrated by: Kara Swisher
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About this listen

Instant New York Times Bestseller

From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.

“Swisher, the bad-ass journalist and OG chronicler of Silicon Valley…takes no prisoners in this highly readable look at the evolution of the digital world…Bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking, just like its author, Burn Book sizzles” (Booklist, starred review).

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 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 heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.©2024 Kara Swisher (P)2024 Simon & Schuster Audio
Biographies & Memoirs Business & Careers History & Culture Popular Culture Witty Innovation Business
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What listeners say about Burn Book

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So Good

Great account of author’s journalistic relationships with the big tech giants. She relates the stories from the start of the internet, through the development of the iPhone and all the social media platforms to the prospects of AI. Very entertaining and well read by the author.

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  • Overall
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A surprising love story for technology

Kara writes as a reporter who loves technology but rightly fears it as well. She personalizes it as any good biographer should but temporizes it as a reporter by good questions. She leaves it unfinished as it should be and a reader/listener looks forward to her future works. Great story of our miraculous times. Hank you Kara!

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Perfect

Masterfully written, entertaining, funny, and above all, thought provoking. Above and beyond my expectations.

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great book

I did not want this book to end.
it was amazing. very matter of fact and very objective.

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The best way to consume this book

If you are a fan of Kara Swisher, you most likely listen to her several times a week via her podcasts.. It only makes sense to listen to her read this memoir.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Nothing burger and entertaining at the same time

If you are reader like me, who has followed Kara and Scott for many years, reading their articles, listening to conferences and podcast etc. to borrow phrase from the book, this book is “nothing burger” as you will already know most of the stories contained in it.
For new readers just starting their journey into the world of tech, this book will be interesting and entertaining.

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Pithy and Insightful as always

I’ve been part of the tech world for as long as Kara and spent my years between Sun Microsystems, Salesforce and my own tech start up. Through it all I’ve enjoyed Kara’s insights, depth of reporting and laughed at her pithy comments about a sector so many hold in high esteem while it too often drowns in its own delusions and narcissism. This fact makes Kara and those like her important voices to create a balance in our understanding of this world and its powerful impact on all of us. Great read/listen.

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Poor baby never got rich with the tech tycoons

Hours of whinnying, when all I was hoping for was some original insights. Kara mailing in the “advocate” and “activist” part of her career - while slowly becoming more and more irrelevant . The bitterness is palpable with this aged out has been - wait, that to nice… never was. She has a passionate despise of anyone who has accomplished real tech progress. Butt hurt complainer and a sad end to a career.

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Gossip columnist

No depth of ideas. Sadly a waste of time and money. In keeping with the word minimum requirements of the system I’m fine.

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Not worth the listen unless you live in the liberal tech bubble.

A book about her and how she made many correct predictions, knew all the major players in the tech world and bashed those whose opinion were different then hers. I was looking forward to hearing interesting stories not "I knew it" and this man and that man were assholes and were wrong.

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