Given how much has been written about Bill Gates over the years, it is surprising to find that this fascinating first of a projected three volumes of memoir is so revealing. But revelations—many of which correct or fill in the public record—abound on every page.
Also surprising—particularly given the public images of the tech billionaires who have come after Gates—is how self-effacing he is, and how quick to credit countless other people for his outsized success. “Often success stories reduce people to stock characters: the boy wonder, the genius engineer, the iconoclastic designer, the paradoxical tycoon,” he writes. “In my case, I’m struck by the set of unique circumstances—mostly out of my control—that shaped both my character and my career.”
Indeed, this narrative, which extends from his parents’ courtship and marriage to the day he and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen returned to Seattle from Albuquerque, where they had first set up shop as Microsoft, reads like a novel in which an unlikely savior appears at every turn to guide the hero on his journey. The number of ways Fate found to intervene in the young Gates’s life to that point is uncanny…at times, it seems positively eerie.
There is one particularly surprising…but no, there are too many of these figures to list and describe them all here—and in any event, doing so would spoil the reader’s experience, as the element of surprise in this narrative makes for extremely pleasurable reading.
A great deal of my high regard for this book stems from my familiarity with so much of its content. Gates, being five years younger than I, grew up in the same temporal environment. Moreover, he spent his early childhood in Seattle’s View Ridge neighborhood, which I know well, having lived there myself, and having a number of relatives who attended the same elementary school. So many of the places he describes are places I’ve frequented. And in 1990, on a magazine assignment, I spent three days with Gates at Microsoft, interviewing him, attending meetings with him, talking over a stunning array of topics about which he displayed prodigious knowledge, many of them unrelated to the software industry. Following that experience, I spent two more years at Microsoft chronicling the experience of a product team that reported to him. I came away from those experiences baffled at how the combination of technological genius, business sense, and intense competitiveness, combined with an odd “normality” about him that ran aslant of his public image. I couldn’t imagine how someone so unusual—and unusually competitive—came out of the laid-back environment the Northwest was during his salad days.
At the time, I wrote: “I tried imagining growing up surrounded by acres of clams, among people content to dwell on their happy condition, and being cursed with little Billy Gates’s outsized intelligence and the tremendous energy that comes with it. He must have felt positively freakish, crackling with a discontent and drive he could find nowhere else in the sea of complacency around him.”
All of my confusion has been thoroughly cleared up by the stories and reflections in this book, particularly in Gates’s relentless descriptions of his tumultuous emotional state in childhood.
Gates has a way of describing his young, alienated self with entertaining good humor: “Somewhere around third or fourth grade, I realized that it wasn’t cool to be reading the World Book for fun, or playing hearts with your grandmother, or wanting to talk about why bridges don’t collapse. A summer reading program at our library was only me and girls.”
Generally, the picture that emerges of young Gates is one of such an angry, withdrawn child, and given to such frightening emotional outbursts at home, that his desperate parents finally found a therapist for him—another of those fateful figures in his life. In Gates’s telling, surviving his childhood is nothing short of miraculous. He looks back at those years of alienation and frustration now with a sense of wonder at the patience and wisdom of his parents, and at the various people who intervened in his life when he most needed them. First among these (aside from his remarkable parents) is his maternal grandmother, his fourth-grade teacher, and the librarian at View Ridge Elementary School—the latter two intervening in a particularly wise fashion to deal with his behavior problems at school, which his teacher realized stemmed from boredom. This teacher, Mrs. Carlson, took him down to the library one day and introduced him to the librarian, Mrs. Caffeire, who gave him the job of finding mis-shelved books and putting them in their proper place. How she dealt with this kid tells us a lot about her assessment of his unique “on the spectrum” intelligence:
She explained that the nonfiction books were shelved according to a numerical range from 000 to 900. To remember the Dewey Decimal system, she told me to memorize a simple story about a caveman asking progressively more sophisticated questions, starting with “Who am I?” (that’s 100: philosophy and psychology) and building up to “How can I leave a record for other people?” (900: history, geography, and biography). When Mrs. Carlson came to get me for recess, I asked her to let me stay. I liked my job. I’m pretty sure my library assistantship was supposed to be a one-time deal. I liked it so much, however, that I showed up early the next day. Mrs. Caffeire seemed surprised, but agreed when I asked if I could become a regular assistant librarian.
One of the surprising things about this book is how little of it involves technological detail. It does make clear how breathtakingly revolutionary the introduction of the silicon chip was to a thoroughly analog world, but it primarily tells the story of an almost enchanted childhood, the endless intellectual horizons presented him at Lakeside School, how, and by whom, Gates was introduced to computing, how he navigated his time at Harvard, who the important and influential people were in his early years, and how his mother and father handled his unconventional life decisions—particularly the decision to drop out of Harvard. It’s an engrossing origin story of arguably the most fascinating figure of my generation, and one of our country’s most influential historical figures. It also—most surprisingly—is a story told with humility and grace.
