Burn Book

A Tech Love Story

By: Kara Swisher

Narrated by: Kara Swisher

Now including a new afterword!

An instant New York Times bestseller from award-winning journalist Kara Swisher, Burn Book is a “highly readable…bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking” (Booklist, starred review) account of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. From “the queen of all media” (Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal), this is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

When tech titans crowed that they would “move fast and break things,” Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts” and prompted Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once observe: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’”

While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering the nascent internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news sites.

Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovations that has both helped and hurt our world. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few of whom Swisher made sweat—figuratively and, in Zuckerberg’s case, literally.

Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.

Critic reviews

"Journalist Kara Swisher specializes in reporting on the Internet. Here she narrates her memoir with urgency and focus, providing a you-are-there history of Silicon Valley. With more than a decade of podcasting experience, Swisher has developed a well-honed, rapid-fire delivery; an aura of journalistic integrity; and a firsthand knowledge of tech history. Anecdotes abound on such topics as discussing the intricacies of lesbian pregnancy with Jeff Bezos and trying to encourage Mark Zuckerberg to remove his sweat-drenched hoodie during a public interview. There are plenty of reveals about the fake-it-til-you-make-it individuals who built tech culture. More importantly, Swisher serves as the Valley's outlier conscience—fearful of the future and optimistically pessimistic."

Get it while it’s hot!

Tech stinks now. Kara is unafraid to point out where the stench is coming from. If you want to know exactly when and how Big Tech went from cool as Fonzie to jumping the shark, put on your oven mitts and push play on Burn Book.

Great Insight - Needs a professional narrator

As a woman in tech and a Kara Swisher fan, I really enjoyed listening to this book. Swisher can definitely come across as a know-it-all, but I love how she speaks truth to power and calls BS on anyone deserving. About 3/4 of the way through the book I got really sick of her mumbling and fast talking. I think the book would’ve done better to either give Kara a speech coach on narration, or had a professional narrator reading it.

Very engaging

I have been following Kara’s work for many years and this book really captures her essence. I’ve always appreciated her willingness to call out BS and this book is an extension of that. I enjoyed it throughly.

Listen to this book to learn what you don’t know. Kara is continually entertaining.

Kara’s writing is so carefully and thoughtfully composed. Her voice fits perfectly with her lnowledgeable writing.

Great read, poignant, personal informative and fun

I am a fan of Kara Swisher and found the book a captivating read. Her personal perspective on the birth of the digital economy and how it has changed the world, gives even more insight into the people that shaped our current culture. I found her relationships with these individuals, so informative and honest. Her frank nature makes the storytelling that much more interesting. She tells a fascinating story, and more importantly her call to action about controls on technological development couldn't be more timely.