Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story

Wall Street Journal reporter Wolfe’s debut zeroes in on a subculture of Silicon Valley’s youngest entrepreneurs, recipients of the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program funded by Paypal founder Peter Thiel who doles out 100,000 grants to people under the age of 20 so they can “drop out of school and head to Silicon Valley.” The book loosely follows the first class of fellows through the experiences of Jonathan Burnham, a teen with a dream of mining heavy metals from asteroids, who was awarded the fellowship in 2011. Through Burnham’s story, readers are introduced to world of dorm-like housing, home to an assortment of oddballs who subsist on weird diets and seek ways to never die. Wolfe provides a lighthearted, at times funny, view of Silicon Valley filled with chatty prose and throwaway comments about investors who are more interested in taking women on dates then backing their technologies. Wolfe rarely addresses the underbelly of this California playscape, touching only briefly on issues such as gender discrimination. (Jan.)