THE NEW NEW THING.

• Author: Ackerman, Elise
• Position: Review

THE NEW NEW THING By Michael Lewis W.W. Norton, $25.99

THE AUTHOR'S MOTHER WARNED JIM Clark not to talk to her son, and when the storied entrepreneur finally saw the galley for The New New Thing, he wished he had listened to her. Michael Lewis had told Clark that he was writing about Silicon Valley. That was true, strictly speaking. It would have been more accurate, however, if Lewis had said he was writing about Silicon Valley as reflected through the remarkable life and singular times of Clark--a 55-year-old digital anarchist cum computer cowboy with a proclivity for creating software programs that blew up the U.S. economy. But this admission might have prompted Clark to limit the hospitality he extended toward the wickedly humorous author, whose kiss-and-tell account of his days as a bond salesman, the best-selling "Liar's Poker", exposed the underbelly of Wall Street. Instead, Clark welcomed Lewis into his life, allowing him to rummage through unopened boxes of personal effects and inviting him on a transatlantic voyage.

Lewis spent 18 months observing Clark's efforts to build the world's largest single-mast sailboat and to construct an Internet company, called Healtheon, that would revolutionize the American health care industry. At some point, Clark learned that Lewis was, in fact, writing a book about him. "I thought, well, that's strange, I didn't know that," Clark recalls. He asked Lewis about it. "He said, `It's really about other things, other than you. But you are the central character.'" In retrospect, that remark should have tipped Clark off about Lewis' intentions. Nevertheless, this most prescient of engineers, credited by many for starting the Internet stampede with the development of the Netscape browser, did not foresee how Lewis would describe the role he played in the Silicon Valley fun-house. That, perhaps, is to Clark's credit.

"I basically was kind of shocked when I read it," Clark remembers. "He allowed me to read it--not to edit it--because I was only allowed to change one word inaccuracies, like a name" Though the book is a spritely read at only 274 pages, it left Clark exhausted. "My first impulse was: I've got to hurry up and hire a CEO for MyCFO [his latest multibillion-dollar venture] because after this book comes out I won't be able to hire anybody."

If Lewis had not written such a wonderful book, we might be tempted to hold this small act of deception against him. But even Clark--a man whose list of past...