Soon after Jeff Goodell turned 20, he left a job at then-fledgling Apple Computer and headed east, away from his hometown of Sunnyvale, California. On his way to the opposite coast, Goodell stopped in Lake Tahoe, won $1,500 at roulette, and promptly lost all of that and more, necessitating a yearlong layover. The description of this bit of personal failure makes up the earliest chapters of Sunnyvale, Goodell's memoir of growing up in Silicon Valley. The author doesn't include the Tahoe incident just to reminisce about youthful decadence; his book is a document of late-'70s to mid-'80s American suburbia, where a pervasive atmosphere of disappointment led his mother to file for divorce and subsequently wreak havoc on the family. Sunnyvale is also a subtle portrait of life as a series of coincidences, shaped by runs of good and bad luck. Goodell, for example, finds his life's direction was rooted in his father's boyhood glandular condition: A longshot operation turned an overweight, lethargic teen into a skinny, confident young man, able to charm a woman into accepting his proposal of marriage (with the help of a future mother-in-law whose concern with social standing prevented her daughter from breaking the engagement). This whirlwind, underdeveloped courtship laid the groundwork for Goodell's parents' eventual divorce. The divorce led to Goodell's Tahoe misadventures—fueled as much by cocaine and casual sex as an inopportune wager—and more extensive horrors for his bitter younger sister Jill and his sexually confused younger brother Jerry, whose severe sibling rivalry led to spirals of substance abuse, promiscuity, prostitution, and disease. The author moves deliberately through each step in the disintegration of what should have been an idyllic Southern California life, contrasting the randomness of his own life with the orderliness of the computer-geek archetype that surrounded him in his early years. Goodell himself never had much affinity for computers, although his understanding of their birthplace led to his current profession, writing about the techie life for national magazines. Nevertheless, Sunnyvale's location is more arbitrary than pertinent. Evocative scene-setting aside, the slip from painful middle-class striving to accepting degradation as a daily routine could happen anywhere—or at least anywhere overnight millionaires dwell, unconsciously mocking the hoi polloi with their outrageous success.