Anyone who knows anything about the genesis of Microsoft probably has a mental picture of the young Bill Gates, its Seattle-born co-founder. Now approaching seventy, Gates is a multibillionaire philanthropist and a mellow figure. But in his teens and early twenties, he was, history records, an obnoxious brat. 

Troubled, perhaps, both by his own memories and by the popular image of his younger self, Gates has produced a highly readable account of his ‘beginnings’, from his birth up to the first flourishing of Microsoft in 1978. The book feels very much like a therapeutic exercise, an airing of what is nowadays sometimes called ‘my truth’. This is Gates’s own version of a story that has been told by other, often unsympathetic, writers. The acknowledgements at the back indicate how deeply he and his researchers have delved in order to produce the portrait. 

As the developer of the software that drove the personal-computing revolution, Gates is one of the people who made possible the way we live and work today. So it’s worth hearing his own answer to the question of what made Bill Gates. It starts with his parents, Bill senior