Rating: 
Summary: Sailing With A Silicon Gatsby
Review: Entrepreneur Jim Clark made so much money in the 1980s and 1990s, it's a shame he couldn't have used some of it to buy himself a clue. To everything there is a season, and Clark had to have magnificent tunnel vision in the late '90s not to see the leaves turning on the dot-com economic revolution he helped create and profited from.
Author Michael Lewis is a little more on the ball in this prescient, engaging account of Clark's doings almost right up until the moment the music stopped. Not that Lewis was so blatant about predicting the bubble's bursting: He enjoyed rather exclusive access to Lewis and probably didn't feel like he could hang his subject out to dry. But the hints are there, and it makes for a juicy narrative.
Lewis is a practitioner of what I call "Rolling Stone" journalism, a ramped-up offshoot of New Journalism where the emphasis is on pizzazz and flashy one-liner endings. The thing is he's really, really good at it. He makes some funny, sage observations that aren't the least bit disposable, however flip the delivery.
"The 'business model' of most Internet companies was to attract huge crowds of people to a Web site, and then sell others the chance to advertise products to the crowds," he writes. "It was still not clear that the model made sense."
Lewis focuses not on Clark's business or technical dealings but his nautical adventures as captain of the world's largest sloop, with which he plans to sail the Atlantic completely under the control of a computer, barring any major foul-up or else Clark getting bored along the way, both of which are highly possible.
As Lewis tells the tale, Clark is both one of the world's most dynamic tycoons and one of its most conspicuous ADD poster children. He has some clever ideas, but leaves the detail work to his followers and is too quickly off to the next new thing: "A plan was merely a theory of how he might spend his day; at all times it clashed in his mind with half a dozen other theories."
I don't read toadying in lines like that; I read a healthy level of friendly, persistent skepticism that becomes Lewis and behooves his subject. It's not that Jim Clark was some kind of space-age snake-oil salesman. He believed in what he was doing. He just couldn't stay interested long enough to save the situation when it started going south.
The sloop story does take up too much of Lewis's narrative, and Lewis does seem to short-shrift the technical end of things, probably because he knows it will slow down his sprightly narrative. The biggest problem in this book is the absence of Clark from the center: Apparently he let Lewis hang around but didn't pause to answer many questions, though if the failure of his health-care venture is any indication it wasn't like he had anything better to do.
This book is no "Moneyball," Lewis's book on building the Oakland A's franchise which is the best available narrative on baseball today. It's better then his overrated "Liars' Poker," though, and makes for an engrossing if shallow immersion in a world that was quickly coming to an end. This isn't the most historically significant voyage ever taken by a Lewis and a Clark, but it makes for an interesting ride.
Rating: 
Summary: How Microsoft Screwed up the Valley
Review: I bought this book after listening to Michael Lewis on NPR. It turned out to be, probably, one of my favorite leisure books of all time. It is a remarkable story about a remarkable and ingenious man (Jim Clark) mostly taking place on a fantastic yacht called the Hyperion. You can appreciate this book at many levels. If you are an engineer/scientist you will enjoy this book. If you are an Entrepreneur or businessman you will find great company in Jim Clark. If you sail you will be nailed by the Hyperion adventure.Michael's excellent writing makes this accurate and detailed book a joy to read. I would have loved to read the pages where Jim slashes Bill Gates but they were probably left out to be politically correct. Also some sections in the book were page fillers and should have been left out to save time.
Rating:
Summary: A Silicon Valley Story
Review: I really enjoyed the story line here. Jim Clark was portrayed as a man who had vision, yet the desire to never be "locked in" to something for too long. One might wonder if all of the time spent dealing with the Board of Silicon Graphics made him change his behavior. I do not agree with some of the posts here stating that the author lives and breathes on the words of Jim Clark. He was a business man that believed there were opportunities and quickly acted upon them. Like everything else, there will always be great and poor business decisions from a leader. No one is an exception here; including Mr. Gates. So, back to the review; this is an excellent book to give folks an insight into the crazy late 90's, where business vision was accelerated 10 fold. Some big successes and many failure stories.
Rating: 
Summary: Shallow and un-insightful
Review: It is quite interesting to read a book about the dot-bomb era written during the dot-bomd era, after the dot-bomb era. For some reason, I've always found Lewis' books rather boring, with flat characters, and lacking depth - and this book is no exception. It is an attempt at a biography but the character it focuses on (Jim Clark), apart from a few idiosincracies, does not have any real profile or areas of interest as an inventor, entrepreneur or business man. He was just a guy with ambition for money and the chance to show off the amount of money he could gather. The book, therefore, runs out very quickly of material topics to elaborate on. There is a fair amount of ramblings regarding venture capital and the funding of technological enterprises but there is very limited anecdotical comments worth pages and pages. In fact, as someone who has been involved in raising capital for IT projects, nothing that the book describes is particularly odd or different from what happens in hundreds of boardroom around the world. Overall, any reader interested in the ins and outs of the mid-90s' frenzy of the Internet business hype is recommended to look elsewhere in titles such as Dot Con, Dot-Bomb, or Burn Rate.
Rating:
Summary: Jim Clark, Hyperion & the Internet Bubble
Review: It's true: this book IS mostly about Hyperion, Jim Clark's huge sailboat, but then again, the book is mostly about Clark himself. If you know how Lewis writes, it's a thread here and there, that weave and become this lively patchwork of ideas and facts, and, in the end, you have a profile of the Valley and one of the main characters that created its allure. Lewis is a master of engaging character portrayals, with intoxicating and hyperbolic prose. He plays objective narrator throughout, sometimes interfering with the plot, but holds no punches in describing Clark's maniacal quest for wealth. In the end, there is a wonderful demonstration that wealth doesn't bring happiness with it. From p. 258: "Why do people perpetually create for themselves the condition for their own dissatisfaction?" -- an retort to Clark's statement that "Once I have more money than Larry Ellison, I'll be satisfied". A few years earlier, satisfaction for Clark amounted to a measly $10 million on the bank; that number mushroomed to $1 billion. Throughout, Lewis conveys the feeling of the Internet bubble of the late 90s; the wealthy, controlling venture capitalists; the insanely-priced IPOs for companies that had no clue how to make money. So yes, that's all a bunch of old old things by now, and if I were looking for a historical account of that period, the book would be worth only 4 stars; yet, I was going for the portrait of Clark, and for those who lived through it, the book is a good behind the scenes look at the creation of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon.
Rating: 
Summary: disgusting portrait of greed and conceit
Review: Lewis takes what would be a boring subject to most people and turns it into an interesting and creative book. Lewis combines the history of the Internet and a narrative to create a book that teaches readers about the business world. Since this book was not just history, it made me interested in what Lewis was writing about. "The New New World" is about Jim Clark setting out to conform his business to the coorporate world he is competing against. Clark is the founder of three multi-billion dollar companies and must compete against other multi-billion dollar companies such as Microsoft to stay successful. Through this book you are able to see the business world in a new light. It is not what some people might see it as. "The New New World" is an intriging book that changes the conventional thinking to a new world of thinking through the mind of Jim Clark. It is a good book that combines the business world, economics and a narrative to create a book that allows readers to see the new way to look at the business world.
Rating:
Summary: Michael Lewis is a Genius!
Review: Michael Lewis is a genius. He is one of the smartest human beings out there, and his writing takes you on an incredible ride. This guy can write like an expert about finance, politics, technology, or sports. He sticks to a field for a while learns everything there is to learn and then writes a book about it, better than anyone who has spent their entire life to that particular field.
He has done it again with "The New New Thing". In his incredible journey through the Silicon Valley of the mid-nineties Michael Lewis shadows Jim Clark while he is out to change the world. Jim Clark is an eccentric engineer self-proclaimed technology messiah, who founded three of the most successful technology corporations: Silicone Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon. At the peak of the dot.com era Jim Clark was worth over three billion dollars. Michael Lewis with his amazing narrative follows Jim Clark, from the time he was worth 300 million to the top of the hill. He digs into Jim Clark's past discovering the all-American dream success story of rising from rags to riches.
The journey is exciting and includes nose-diving airplane rides, venturing the high seas of the Atlantic Ocean with a bunch of nerds, and redefining the way VCs went about money. If you never understood in depth what happened in the infamous dot.com era this book would give you the best account.
Rating:
Summary: Multi-entrepreneur Jim Clark - Genius and/or madman???
Review: Michael Lewis is the author of several entertaining books, such as Liar's Poker (1989), Next: The Future Just Happened (2001), Moneyball (2003). The author explains that it was not his intention to write an autobiography about Jim Clark, but he was trying to capture the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley. However, due to the amazing enthusiasm of multiple entrepreneur Jim Clark Lewis ends up following Clark. Jim Clark, who originally was a technology professor, is the first person to start 3 companies that each exceed a market valuation of $1 billion each: Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon. The book starts with the maiden trial of Jim Clark's multi-million dollar yacht 'Hyperion'. This enormous yacht is full of (ridiculous) technology and should be able sail on its own. The trial of the 'Hyperion' is just the start of an almost endless list of crazy, wild stories about technology companies, Internet start-ups, and IPOs'. The author seems to have trouble keeping up with Jim Clark's ideas and (true) stories. Yes, I do like this book. Although it mainly focuses on multi-entrepeneur Jim Clark, it also describes the stories behind various Internet-companies (AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.) and the Internet bubble. The writing style of the author is extremely entertaining, while still containing lots of information and facts. The book feels like a rollercoaster, but it is great fun!! I recommend it highly.
Rating: 
Summary: Not as good as Liars poker
Review: Very well written but gives an insight into Clark's life more than an insight into Silicon Valley. Reads more like a biography and does not capture the wheeling dealing in Silicon Valley whcih the reader might have expected to see.
Rating:
Summary: Life of an Internet Salesman
Review: When Lewis set out to write this book, he was attempting to expose and satirize silicon valley in the same way he had skewered wall street in his previous books. In the course of writing the book, he is introduced to Jim Clark. The New New Thing then becomes a hagiography of Clark's personality, ambitions, and achievements. Though I found the book entertaining and well-written, I was disappointed that the author casts such an unskeptical eye on Clark. Lewis saves his satire for the one person that most readers could empathize with - Allan (the Captain of Clark's boat) and an internet investor. One quarter of the book is devoted to Lewis's time on Clark's yacht - this narrative is wholly gratuitous and lends little to the story other than to show that the author had unparalleled acess to Clark. This book would be richer, if a preface was added. Lewis wrote this book before the NASDAQ topped off in March 2000 - and one wonders if Lewis would assign Clark any responsibility for the hype that was created and the real life consequences for those who lost large amounts of money in the ensuing crash.
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