I like Schweizer's earlier books quite a bit,
Clinton Cash was too targeted (especially to hit the racks during the election) and flimsy and boring really, but his earlier stuff was less targeted. I don't mean that in a he managed "both sides" way, which he did but it was less because it was intentional. More it was he was looking at a certain issue, say Congress members trading stock based on legislative knowledge, and he hit on whoever was doing it. In that case, Nancy Pelosi got hit because her husband had made some of the larger credit card trades. When he focused on how the parties
require their members to spend 40% of their time fundraising, it was mostly all about Republicans because they were in power and especially in the House that's everything. (Recently, I've seen Pelosi and the Democrats get criticized for this from left outlets just discovering the practice.)
So hopefully this is more a return to form than the Clinton book was. Just from the chapters and pictures he has as much about Biden and Kerry as McConnell/Chao and the Kushners. From the stuff so far, I think the only reason Hastert isn't on the cover is because nobody knows who he is and also he's a bit more known for... other things... now. He also is taking care of his new Fox audience by right off the bat explaining to them that while China may be full of official Communists, that you should think of them as regular businessmen rather than Marxist ideologues. He also compares the Trump Organization to the Princelings and guanxi.
Lastly, regarding the rest of
Valley of Genius, I quite liked that overall. Especially the chapter on Twitter where they are all explaining how they and especially other people aren't sure if it's an idea that will go anywhere, interspersed with @RealDonaldTrump tweets.
I still think it would probably work better as multiple books. It doesn't cover Microsoft at all, which okay, they're not in the Valley, but they loom large over it. You wouldn't even know what Oracle is for example or why Larry Ellison is mentioned so many times by people in the book except for the fact that he lived near Steve Jobs. The book also goes from Atari and Apple to WIRED MAGAZINE to the internet to the iPhone. The Internet really should have been a second book, so they could flesh both it and the earlier stuff out better. I mean in this book, Netscape has a huge IPO (why? uh...) then the dot-com bust happens, but eBay is okay! Then Google and Facebook happen and then Steve Jobs dies and we get Twitter. That's the whole story of The Internet in this book. And half of it is taken up with space for Steve Jobs to single handedly create the iPod and then iPhone thanks to reading Wired Magazine's glossy page spreads.
I still liked it, because I like all these oral history books, but some of them aren't doing proper scope checking. The scope of SNL/ESPN/MTV/Food Network fits within a book. Basketball history (not just professional), especially when you're force feeding chapters on diversity just to have them, and SILICON VALLEY'S ENTIRE HISTORY are way beyond the scope, so you shouldn't even try. Scale it back and focus. The guy who wrote this Silicon Valley book says he spent like six years gathering the material, and I have to assume 80% of it got edited out of the book in the end because he tried to cram all the events into one book without realizing he should have been keeping more of the material. The SNL book for example works so well because you have the original SNL team, the utter collapse of the show, the return of Lorne with Eddie Murphy, the 90s rebirth team with Farley, etc. and then an endgame of the team in Tina Fey, etc. getting big beyond SNL. (Jimmy Fallon's not yet ascent to the Tonight Show would have been an ideal capper for that book.) Plus there's only so much they can say about it. You don't want anecdotes from everyone about the crunch process of getting a live show prepared for Saturday Night, you only needed the chapter on that process once. When it comes to say tech, if someone isn't familiar with something, like Xerox PARC, you spend a lot of time telling them what it is. And you have to assume that across nearly everything. The chapter on Napster would be incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't there using it and experienced that whole rise and fall as a user. (Extra hilarious about that is lots of people point out that Napster effectively led to the iPod/iTunes, one person actually mentions KaZaA, Morpheus, etc. But what's not mentioned at all? BitTorrent. The technology that achieved what Napster or any of those other services couldn't inherently. The official company is even in the Valley ffs!)
