Cuts past the deceit, examining the histories the fable dresses up in heroic garb ... Harris reconsiders 200 years of history that many in the town would rather forget. Over more than 600 concussive pages, Harris narrates the town’s evolution and influence throughout the 19th and 20th centuries ... Palo Alto is a skeptic’s record, a vital, critical demonstration of Northern California’s two centuries of mixing technology and cruelty for money ... Even while attending to larger patterns, Palo Alto studiously works through the town’s history by focusing on its most famous and influential residents ... Harris demonstrates that the charming story with which we began, in which hippies freed the world by virtue of their genius and creativity, was always a convenient deception.

Aan encyclopedic account of the history and impact of the town—feels like the culmination of [Harris'] upbringing and career. It’s a stunning, Technicolor anvil of a book ... Palo Alto is far from the first history of the town, its residents, or its influence, but it is among the most capacious. Its strength lies in this very broadness, in the book’s determination to cover art and crime and drugs and economics and eugenics and robots and attempt to tie it all together as the story of modernity ... If Palo Alto is an imperfect frame for understanding a history as gargantuan as the one that Harris recounts, Palo Alto nonetheless manages to tell a story that is grand in its scope, startling in its specifics, and ingenious in the connections it draws.

Since 'California has a privileged place' in the capitalist story, and capitalism controls the world, this book aims to explain, well, pretty much everything. It does not succeed ... For Harris, as for Marx, capitalism is the root of all societal evil ... But what should replace this capitalist horror show once it’s been shattered? Harris never tells us ... It’s a cartoonishly negative and over-theorized portrait that bears little or no resemblance to the complex realities of California, capitalism or the world ... Harris’s seamless, all-explanatory narrative feels increasingly and weirdly teleological, like a cult belief system. Every fact fits perfectly into a truth that is already known; exceptions only prove the rule.

Harris has dug deep into the task. The scheme here is history as microcosm: Palo Alto works outward from scrupulous specifics to an epic panoramic recasting of our whole dire situation. The book should be of urgent interest to anyone living inside its ambit—that being, according to its subtitle, California, capitalism, and the world ... Harris is terrific at character sketches ... Harris animates a frieze of predominantly deplorable white men of power, influence, and ego in his detailed prose. But at the same time, he has a larger vision, one in keeping with his Marxist analytics: A system like capitalism finds the villains it needs ... As the mosaic that Harris builds in Palo Alto accumulates its pieces, readers jonesing for dirt on Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Elizabeth Holmes will not be disappointed. They will, however, be made to sit on their hands for a while. Not until page 439 does the curtain rise on a more contemporary parade of deplorables ... Readers will relish Palo Alto for its scope and precision, for its pugnaciousness, and for its sardonic amazement at an emperor who couldn’t be strolling down the avenue any nakeder. There’s a brute glee in Harris’s version of historical materialism; even the book’s title eschews metaphor and abstraction. Harris has done the hard work, and he has done it in a cause: to urge us to awake from our capitalist-technological inertial dream state. The truth may sometimes hurt, but the lies are in bed with collective death.

This is less a history of capitalism than a condemnation. With its tangents and excursions...you may find yourself coming back to the same question: What exactly does this have to do with Palo Alto? ... Fortunately, Harris has an unignorable and caustically engaging attitude to go with his verbosity ... Palo Alto doesn’t stay...memoirish, which is kind of a shame; the story of how the town fostered Harris’ anti-capitalist fervor would surely make for a ripping yarn. But he’s got bigger stories to tell ... Harris’ stridency is baked into Palo Alto; there is no separating the tone from the tale. But the book usually comes alive when he’s delving into people, rather than ideas, and he remembers that he’s writing a story, not a treatise ... A harder edit would have helped on both the micro and macro levels. Harris has a way of piling clause upon clause upon clause, and his focus wanes as he gets stuck in the weeds of a subject. He could have used someone to remind him that a 500-page book might meet more readers than a doorstop.

The book presents a polemical but thorough history ... Though it avoids autobiography, Harris’s book is nonetheless as much a product of Palo Alto as the author himself ... This work of rewriting stories that saturated the author’s own childhood environment is what makes Harris’s book more than a synthesis and vulgarization of academic histories of Silicon Valley ... Evaluating a book that is at once so detailed and so ambitious demands too much of any single reviewer. Professional historians will be better placed to weigh the merits of Harris’s presentation and to say whether it deserves the amount of publicity it has already received.

Deeply researched and richly detailed ... Harris instead argues that returning the land to the Ohlone could help 'draw a new path' ... But he entirely bypasses another way forward: reclaiming Silicon Valley for the public ... Palo Alto misses the core of curiosity and experimentation that still exists there, fuel for a less profit-obsessed future Valley.

The depersonalization on display here is a welcome corrective to the overpersonalized way that history is typically written for a general audience ... At times, however, Harris overcorrects ... While his theoretical pronouncements can be mechanistic, the story itself is layered and nuanced. At its best, Palo Alto reads like a big social novel in the tradition of John Dos Passos ... Harris has given us nothing less than a new way of looking at Silicon Valley and its lineages ... But completeness can also be a curse, and Palo Alto would be a better book if it aspired to be less comprehensive.

A searching history ... Long but consistently engaging ... A highly readable revisionist history of the Golden State, sharply argued and well researched.