Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family - Hardcover

Goodell, Jeff

3.43

94 ratings by Goodreads

9780679456988: Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679456988 ISBN 13: 9780679456988

Publisher: Villard, 2000

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"Hi, it's Jeff." Silence. "Your grandson," I added.
"Oh. Yes. Jeff. How are you?"
I told him I'd like to stop by and introduce him to my wife.
"Great," he said, sounding genuinely surprised. "Why don't you come by and pet the robots?"

In Sunnyvale, California, in 1979, Jeff Goodell's family lived quietly on Meadowlark Lane, unaware that their town was soon to become ground zero in the digital revolution. Then one day his mother announced that she and his father were divorcing after twenty years of marriage. Big deal, thought Jeff. "Everybody we knew was splitting up-it was the romantic equivalent of the pet-rock craze." Over the next decade, Silicon Valley boomed, and the Goodell family unraveled. Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family is the story of a fragile, all-too-ordinary family caught at the epicenter of one of the great economic, cultural, and technological explosions in recent history.

After the divorce, Goodell's mother went to work for a little company called Apple Computer and began her ascent into the new world; his father, a landscape contractor who valued plants and trees over bits and bytes, found himself alone and falling farther and farther behind. For the Goodell children, the aftershocks brought pain and confusion: Jeff ran off to Lake Tahoe and the fast track to nowhere; his younger brother, Jerry, began a nightmarish descent into drugs, alcohol, and sexual experimentation; and eleven-year-old Jill bounced between two houses, struggling to make sense of her shattered world.

Watching it all was grandfather Leonard Goodell, a Westinghouse ur-geek who-even in his late seventies-still had enough mental horsepower to work as a lead engineer in a robotics factory. But as Leonard watched his son's family fall apart, he realized his worldly success had not come without a human cost, and near the end of his life he began his own quest for forgiveness and redemption.

Sunnyvale is a portrait of a way of life that is no more, in a place where progress runs wild. It is about individuals struggling to make lives for themselves in a brutally Darwinian world. Above all, it is about what we owe to the people we love. A unique and compelling family story, it is also a resonant document of our age.

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Review:

In the town of Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley, every day brings sunshine and progress, and everything is supposed to work out okay. Not surprisingly, this thoughtful and deeply affecting memoir tells the story of a family that falls apart (or rather "off the Norman Rockwell easel") in the midst of this fantasy. When Mrs. Goodell decides to get a divorce, she blasts off from Planet Marriage and hitches her future to the embryonic Apple Computer company. The other family members, however, quickly unravel. Jeff, the oldest son, quits his Apple job for the casinos of Lake Tahoe, fully believing he is "leaving behind a bunch of nerdy machine heads who were destined to live small, narrow lives empty of romance or mystery." His father, a landscape architect and a family man devastated by the divorce, finds himself becoming an anachronism in the Silicon Valley chip-and-code culture. And the sensitive youngest son, Jerry, plunges into drugs, alcohol, and sexual experimentation.

While there are amusing anecdotes about what happens in the cubicles of the computer industry, Goodell focuses his clear eyes and likable style on the powerful relations of family members in crisis--on the corrosive power of competition between siblings, the disillusionment of seeing a parent fail, the despair of witnessing a loved one self-destruct, and the inevitable backlash that happens when we try to run away. Goodell himself is party to this universal irony for, despite trying to flee Silicon Valley culture, he's became one of its best-known chroniclers. And in the Valley, he finds the greatest metaphor for escape:

I feel like I'm looking down into the heart of a vast electronic hive, where the honey is time: faster chips, faster software, faster wires. It's not about efficiency--it is about cheating death. Dreaming of speed is the way engineers dream of immortality.

The men in Goodell's family are, in their own ways, at odds with this reigning faith. Goodell has given us a powerful and ultimately redemptive example of a family caught in the vortex of rapidly changing times and the tragedy wrought on those left behind. --Lesley Reed

From the Back Cover:

"This is a riveting memoir, hard to stop reading and hard to forget. It is slyly presented as being about life in the high-tech economy, but it's really about Life."
-James Fallows
I loved the word Sunnyvale. It was different from the names of the towns around us-like San Jose and Palo Alto and San Francisco, which had a dreamy, old Spanish romance about them. And it was not a name like Silicon Valley, which Sunnyvale was right in the middle of, but which always made me think of breasts and robots. The word Sunnyvale had utopian flair. It suggested to me that I lived in a special place-a world of sunshine and progress, of new gizmos and old fruit trees, where life promised to be a rocket ride across friendly skies. Streets were named after birds and flowers, and I could walk all the way to school on beautifully curving sidewalks, and my fourth-grade class took field trips to buildings where people smashed atoms and built satellites. How could I not feel lucky? I lived in a place where, as my mother often counseled me after a hard day, "everything will work out okay."
And for a long time, I believed her.

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