The Dinner Club: Shannon Henry
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Washington Post tech reporter Henry’s first book is a lively account of a billionaire boys club-members include Netscape’s Marc Andreessen and AOL’s Steve Case-whose purpose was to establish Washington, D.C., as a center of Internet activity. Henry attended the monthly dinners, during which startup CEOs wooed the group, who then nonchalantly voted whether to invest truckloads of cash-”thumbs up or thumbs down” like “the lions and the Christians.” The book is ultimately a meditation on the nature of oligarchy during these dizzying times. The titans prove surprisingly fallible, combining the quixotic hope of transformative change while repressing the underlying harsh fiscal reality. Egotistical, greedy, petty, pretentious, grandiose and arrogant, the executives ultimately wanted to overhaul the entire world for the better and fell woefully short of that laudable goal. While the book usefully humanizes these tycoons, it also caters to the ordinary reader’s schadenfreude, as the executives glumly watch their paper fortunes dissipate, concoct “Armageddon situations” and undertake “wealth preservation” (a euphemism for curtailing heedless squandering). The book is riotous and riveting, but not flawless. Henry too often leaves readers hankering for more information, and the book’s chronology is sometimes irritatingly out of whack. Still, this brisk and incisive account combines the furtive thrill of restricted access with an outsider’s detached reflection.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Imagine being the proverbial “fly on the wall” when the Capital Investors met the second Monday of each month. Washington Post columnist Henry provides us with such a perspective on this group of 26 of Washington’s technology elite, who met throughout the booming 1990s to form a social network and, more important, to encourage entrepreneurship, new investment funds, and personal networking. Among the club’s members were Steve Case, chair of AOL/Time Warner; Alfred R. Berkeley III, vice chair of Nasdaq Stock Market; John Disgmore, CEO of WorldCom; and Michael Saylor, cofounder, chair, and CEO of MicroStrategy. Henry, known as the “dot-com diva,” lets readers listen in on significant conversations held over expensive, thoroughly described dinners at four-star restaurants where members considered possible start-up investments. She chronicles dinners held through the Internet boom to the market crash, after which Henry was briefly voted out of the dinner sessions. The Capital Investors group stirred some controversy since they didn’t have women members and “their investments at times seemed haphazard.” This book describes not only this turbulent time and its business stars but also influential events and privileged conversations as they happened. Recommended especially for academic business and larger public library collections.
Lucy Heckman, St. John’s Univ. Lib., Jamaica, NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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