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O'Mara, Margaret. The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. New York: Penguin Press, 2019. Pp. 485. ISBN 9780399562181 (cloth) $30.00; 9780399562204 (paper) $20.00; 9780399562198 (ebook) $14.99.
This ambitious book, the author's third, provides a readable, amiable, and only frequently critical social history of the years between 1940-2010 and of the Silicon Valley state of mind, and the impact of the political, social, and historical revolution, "everything about the high-tech revolution except the technology" (p. 417) as O'Mara concluded. She uses among her multi-modal resources the scholarship of others who chronicled the "computer hardware, software, and telecommunications industries" (p. 417). Key works in the computer technology body of knowledge are amply documented in the comprehensive bibliography and notes for communication scholars who want to follow through on historical-critical approaches to the industry. Along with extensive scholarship, O'Mara relied on archives at the Palo Alto computer history museum, archives at Stanford and Harvard, and the Nixon and Clinton presidential libraries. Currently a professor of history at the University of Washington, she worked in the Clinton White House and as a contributing researcher at the Brookings Institution.
The...