PALO ALTO

"A monumental work of research and imagination, Palo Alto is destined to sit on a high shelf next to other unforgettable works of national history.” ? ESQUIRE, Best Books of 2023 "This doorstep sized tome explores the history of Silicon Valley and the town at its center, Palo Alto, California. Billed as the "first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley," Harris traces over a hundred years of colonialism to explore how this unlikely suburb became the mecca for the digital gold rush. This book's time is definitely now.” --Salon, Best Books of 2023 “Harris's earlier book Kids These Days was a broad cultural history of millennials, zeroing in on the unfair economic stereotypes that have dogged the generation. Now, he tells an ambitious story of Silicon Valley, showing how its specific culture and history allowed it to become the site of both breathtaking technological advancement and capitalist exploitation.” ? THE NEW YORK TIMES “Palo Alto is a skeptic's record, a vital, critical demonstration of Northern California's two centuries of mixing technology and cruelty for money Even while attending to larger patterns, [the book] studiously works through the town's history by focusing on its most famous and influential residents. conviction and research burn through the page and give coherence and urgency to a daunting subject.” ? THE WASHINGTON POST “A searching history of California and its role in predatory, extractive capitalism [Harris] proposes a program of divestiture and restitution, including ‘the forfeit of Stanford's vast accumulated wealth,' that is breathtaking in its audacity highly readable, sharply argued and well researched.” ?KIRKUS REVIEWS, Starred Review “It's a sprawling tale, covering juicy stories Harris handles it all with dizzying detail and charmingly loopy metaphors Harris describes himself as a communist, and that analysis is peppered through the text, but he has a knack for boiling down complicated dynamics to their blunt basics.” ?LOS ANGELES TIMES

UK: Quercus;

“Malcolm Harris's singular and brilliant PALO ALTO is a geologic survey of the bedrock of the imperial violence that lies beneath the surface of some of the country's wealthiest Zip Codes. The formations it follows stretch outward across the globe, to Asia, Europe, across the Americas and to the rest of the United States. In the end, the book provides not so much an account of strict cause and effect—the familiar history of the robber barons and tech tycoons—but a core sample of the thorough-going greed and pillage at the heart of American history: the expropriation, the violence, and the guilt that seep upward through the soil of neoliberalism's most fruitful plain.” ?Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and African American Studies at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America "Extraordinary. In lucid, personal, often funny, and always insightful prose, Malcolm Harris finds the driving thrust of reaction not in capitalism's left-behind regions but in its vanguard: California, and specifically Silicon Valley. We have not yet felt the full force of the shit storm that the titans of tech have been conjuring. We soon will. If you want to understand what's coming, you need to read this book." ?Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of Myth