Martin Vander Weyer
He’s Probably Not Going to Be Your Pal
The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power
By Max Chafkin
Bloomsbury 366pp £25 order from our bookshop
Who is Peter Thiel and why does he matter? The answer, according to this book’s blurb, is that he’s a US-based technology investor and political-campaign funder who wields behind-the-scenes influence on ‘countless aspects of contemporary life’. While some American readers may know what Thiel looks like and even think of him as a role model, I suspect that for most British readers his name will ring only a distant bell and his face is unknown. Jobs of Apple, Zuckerberg of Facebook, Bezos of Amazon, Musk of Tesla:
these we know. But Thiel of PayPal and Palantir? Not so much.
Max Chafkin is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek who has been covering technology and start-up stories in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for fifteen years. His objective is to place Thiel in a broad perspective of technological progress and US political change. For readers who don’t know much about Thiel already, he also faces the task of making him sound sufficiently powerful and charismatic that they finish the book thinking they now understand who’s really been pulling America’s strings.
Does Chafkin achieve that? On balance I’d have to say not quite, though he has produced a very competent example of the American style of investigative business writing. He assembles his material with clarity but doesn’t overload the detail and isn’t afraid to pass judgement. And he must have
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf
'The authorities are able to detain individuals in solitary confinement for up to six months at a secret location', which 'increases the risk to the prisoner of torture'.
@lucyjpop looks at two cases of China's brutal crackdown on free expression.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/xu-zhiyong-thupten-lodoe
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back