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Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley
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Author: Christine A. Finn
List Price: $30.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0262062240
Publisher: MIT Press (01 November, 2001)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 323,454
Average Customer Rating: 2.57 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 1 out of 5
Disappointed
I had high expectations for this book, however I was severely disappointed. The book makes claims at being some sort of archaeologist's study, but it reads like a badly written vacation journal written by an easily impressed child. Finn locks onto the most trivial aspects of Silicon Valley and Internet culture and romanticizes them in a way that only someone who doesn't understand them would.
Rating: 5 out of 5
A different view of the valley, removed from the hype
This book takes a look at the other side of the Silicon Valley: the side removed from the glitz and glamour of the Silicon Valley (or at least what it had during the writing of the book).
Other reviewers wanted more coverage of local companies. For that, they should turn to the dozens of business publications that already cover that information, or the dozens of books that chronicle the history of the Valley and its various star companies.This book was written to help outsiders understand the reality of the Silicon Valley and, having been written from the perspective of an outsider, finds significant details that insiders either simply take for granted or just don't notice. It describes the social foundations upon which the Silicon Valley was built and upon which it currently rests, and uses that information to try to explain how the Valley of Hearts Delight was tranformed. In this regard, the book truly is an archaeological treatise, but written in a friendly and readable style that allows the reader to experience the scene firsthand.
Rating: 2 out of 5
get English-Lueck's Cultures@SiliconValley instead
This is not the best book for insights about the Valley. As the other reviewers suggest, this book has a bit of a split personality. On the one hand, one has a stream of observational anecdotes about the Valley. All of the usual cliches are here: Fry's, Buck's Diner, the cherry stands, the one-a-one traffic jams. These read like someone is trying their hand at writing a confessional ethnographic tale, but without a theoretical argument to provide a central structure. On the other hand, one has a stream of stories about computer-as-artifact -- tales about the collectors, like Nathan Myhrvold, and the people who recycle computers, and so on. One gets the feeling that the author set out to write a book about the latter, found it a bit thin, and the editor suggested fleshing it out with some bubble-era backdrop.
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