It is a gripping, uncomfortable read. One wants to identify the moment when Hsieh’s life turned a corner ... At its heart, this is a story about addiction ... Au-Yeung and Jeans, who covered Hsieh’s death for Forbes magazine, want to tell another story, though, about the dark side of the tech boom. There is something to this ... Why didn’t anyone force Hsieh into treatment? Au-Yeung and Jeans have performed a true service by trying to find out, interviewing many of those in his inner circle. Their writing is frustratingly clunky, as if written in haste. But the material is compelling, with the gathering tension of a slow-motion disaster. The final chapters, documenting a series of interventions that went nowhere, are riveting ... They default to a conclusion worthy of a TED Talk: that Hsieh was doomed because happiness is an intrinsically unreachable goal ... This is an unsatisfying ending, given the evidence they have laid out in the preceding pages.
A compelling and tragic story, but it’s also more than that. The authors pose questions that reverberate beyond Hsieh’s life. Are entrepreneurs more subject to mental-health problems than the average population?
Somber ... The story has an inevitably tragic end, though the authors offset the self-doomed, mentally ill Hsieh’s downward spiral with his generosity and well-intentioned efforts to do well by doing good ... A readable, sobering study of entrepreneurial brilliance laid low.
Nuanced, sympathetic ... Au-Yeung and Jeans’s empathetic portrait is as enthralling as it is achingly sad, combining rich research with a propulsive novelistic style. Readers will have a hard time putting this down.
