The breezy memoir of a highflying journalist who, at 61, is still on top of her game ... While she gets off satisfying shots at familiar targets, there aren’t quite enough incendiary new anecdotes to justify the book’s tantalizing title ... A more substantial oversight is that her preoccupation with the personalities of the few at the top risks obscuring the incentive systems that keep elevating the unscrupulous to those positions ... A lively read from a sui generis figure, provided you don’t mind rolling your eyes now and then at how often the moral of a given encounter turns out to be that Swisher was right all along.
Ultimately underwhelming ... The problem is that Swisher tells two conflicting stories that are never convincingly woven together ... Burn Book’s fatal flaw, the reason it can never fully dispel the whiff of opportunism that dooms any memoir, is that Swisher never shows in any convincing detail how her entanglement with Silicon Valley clouded her judgment. The story of her change of heart is thus undercut by the self-aggrandizing portrait that rests stubbornly at its core.
Elevates above...gossipy romp ... Swisher is the perfect journalist to chronicle these men. She clearly relishes jousting with arrogant males, and she shares the inner drive that propels and torments them ... Swisher might have gone sour on the tech bros, but like them, she is sometimes too starry-eyed about anything that calls itself progress.
A tortured and tortuous memoir that, in remixing swaths of past reporting and commentary, as well as regurgitating tales she’s told ad nauseam ... The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price ... This is a compelling narrative only if you ignore every available fact.
