dot.bomb
 J. David Kuo
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Little, Brown & Co.
 ISBN: 0316089702
  Paperback - Amazon's price: $14.95
Amazon's book prices can change without notice

My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath.

Okay, Readers, fasten your seatbelts, roll up your windows, strap down your pets, shoo your significant other off to Bingo, & pay your electricity bill because you will not be able to put dot.bomb down until you have turned the last page!

What a ride! & what a writer! I was squirming with tension, panting with pressure & both dreading & eager to see what was going to happen next.

There are some people's stories that are stranger than fiction & J. David Kuo's is one of them. He was senior vice president of communications at Value America & on the cover it says it's about those wonder years of “entrepeneurial bravado and corporate hijinks at once hilarious and, in the post-Enron world, oddly benign...the story of the internet gold rush...as told by an insider.”

Written in three parts: You Say You Want A Revolution, Money For Nothing & Helter Skelter, J. David Kuo has a finger on the pulse of his time, cliches & slogans stream across your vision, creating a time, a place & an intense glimpse into what went on behind the headlines & Wall Street. Chapter headings include: Dream Weaving, Peddling Sand, IPO: Instant Payoff Occasion, Hear Me Roar, Counting Sheep, To the moon, Alice, to the moon! & many more, except those titles mean something other than what we're used to.

As J. David Kuo writes in his Prologue: “Investing in stocks wasn't something I'd ever done before. I hadn't done it because I'd never had any money to invest.” What he wanted, in 1999, was to “cash in on some easy and plentiful money. Everyone was doing it.” What actually happened turned an idealistic man who had just spent a decade “in the political and not-for-profit worlds [where] the psychic rewards were great [although the] financial ones less so.” His last $10K were burning a hole in his pocket, & he wanted to buy some shares in Value America. What he ended up doing was working for that company...“flying on a private jet, and cruising on a ninety-foot yacht— all care of a southern California law school dropout who got his retail start selling fly swatters.”

Juggling millions of dollars like Monopoly^® money, these high flyers, who scarcely had a bed between them to call their own, were caught up in the running of the Bulls in this once-in-a-lifetime era of speculation. Two previous notable mass hysterias were: The Great Crash 1929 & the South Sea Bubble 200 years before that. These ardent young men made things happen from their rarified height that could only be imagined from below.

So, if you want to know what happened during the dot.com gold rush, dot.bomb is a very good place to start. It is engaging, taut & as funny as a faux pas at a funeral!

Very well done!

J. David Kuo has also worked for the CIA, for a U.S. senator & as a journalist & speechwriter. This is his first book.
(07/20/03)

Rebecca