But if Gates’ entire career has been defined by his ability to peer into the future, his latest venture requires him to meditate on his past. His new memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, covers his early years and ends when he’s just 23 years old (no mean feat for a man who declares himself “not prone to nostalgia”). Readers hungry to hear more about Microsoft or his later philanthropic work will have to wait—this 312-page book is the first of three planned volumes chronicling his life.
Bill Gates & Paul Allen at teletype machine at Lakeside School (1969-1970) (Photo: redit: Lakeside School / Source Code)
Naturally, being a child prodigy had its downsides. “Bigger kids picked on me. Looking back, I can’t say I felt lonely or even hurt,” he recalls. “More than anything I was just kind of baffled: Why didn’t kids see things my way?” This yawning gulf between how Gates experienced the world compared to the people around him stretches into his time at Harvard, where he struggled to stand out in a crowd of similarly gifted students. The University’s associate director of computing called him “a wise ass”; another professor described him as insubordinate. Programming turned out to be his salvation, and paved the way for him to build the world’s third-most valuable company.
The best new books to read in February 2025
Read MoreThe young Gates loved maths because it’s built on indisputable facts. His memoir deals in the same kinds of methodical, predictable patterns at the expense of drama or intrigue. This steadfast commitment to telling us what happened, rather than how he felt about what happened, means that Source Code offers little in the way of juicy revelations for seasoned Gates watchers, although casual readers might enjoy his recollections of the handful of times he’s taken LSD, his love of the card game bridge or obsession with rollercoasters. These brief humanising moments are the closest we get to learning more about the man behind the businessman. But it’s never long before the book snaps right back to business as usual.
It’s both a touching thought and a missed opportunity. In a different kind of memoir, this suspected diagnosis would have made an engrossing prism through which to reexamine his youth. It’s a real shame – but there’s always book two (and three).
Rhiannon Williams is a reporter at MIT Technology Review magazine and the i’ paper’s former technology correspondent
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The surprising missed opportunity in Bill Gates’s memoir )
Also on site :