Innovators (Isaacson) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Mr. Isaacson's gifts as an enthusiast and explicator remain impressive…As this book so clearly demonstrates, he is a kindred spirit to the visionaries and enthusiasts who speed us so thrillingly into the technological future.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


[A] sweeping and surprisingly tenderhearted history of the digital age…[The Innovators] is…absorbing and valuable, and Isaacson's outsize narrative talents are on full display. Few authors are more adept at translating technical jargon into graceful prose, or at illustrating how hubris and greed can cause geniuses to lose their way.
Brendan I. Koerner - New York Times Book Review


A sprawling companion to his best-selling Steve Jobs...this kaleidoscopic narrative serves to explain the stepwise development of 10 core innovations of the digital age—from mathematical logic to transistors, video games and the Web—as well as to illustrate the exemplary traits of their makers.... Isaacson unequivocally demonstrates the power of collaborative labor and the interplay between companies and their broader ecosystems.... The Innovators is the most accessible and comprehensive history of its kind.
Matthew Wisnioski - Washington Post


Isaacson provides a sweeping and scintillating narrative of the inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs who have given the world computers and the Internet. . . . a near-perfect marriage of author and subject . . . an informative and accessible account of the translation of computers, programming, transistors, micro-processors, the Internet, software, PCs, the World Wide Web and search engines from idea into reality.... [A] masterful book.
San Francisco Chronicle


(Starred review.) The history of the computer as told through this fascinating book is not the story of great leaps forward but rather one of halting progress.... Isaacson examines [numerous] figures in lucid, detailed narratives, recreating marathon sessions of lab research, garage tinkering, and all-night coding in which they struggled to translate concepts into working machinery.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Isaacson is a storyteller of the kind he admires among the people who made the bits and pieces that would become computers,... describing these individuals vividly and succinctly.... [The book] should be on the reading lists of book discussion groups and high school and college courses across the curriculum. —Linda Loos Scarth, Cedar Rapids, IA
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A remarkable overview of the history of computers from the man who brought us biographies of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Henry Kissinger . . . Isaacson manages to bring together the entire universe of computing, from the first digitized loom to the web, presented in a very accessible manner that often reads like a thriller.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Throughout his action-packed story, Isaacson reiterates one theme: Innovation results from both "creative inventors" and "an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together."... [A] vigorous, gripping narrative.
Kirkus Reviews