The Silicon Valley boom is such an intricate, rapidly expanding web that each book written about it seems destined to be swallowed up before it hits the shelves. Rather than present an instantly dated overview of the technological morass, Michael Lewis' lively, virtuoso non-fiction The New New Thing narrows its focus to Jim Clark, a larger-than-life trailblazer who embodies both the Valley's innovative spirit and its grotesque hubris. The founder of three multi-billion-dollar companies—Silicon Graphics, a manufacturer of workstations and supercomputers; Netscape, the Internet browser; and Healtheon, a unifying entity for the health-care industry—Clark views himself as more of a conceptual artist than an old-school businessman. In a series of outsized, Tom Wolfeian comic setpieces, Lewis follows him on his egomaniacal (and conveniently metaphorical) quest to build the world's largest sailboat, the 157-foot Hyperion, and have all its functions controlled entirely by computers without the need for a crew. Meanwhile, Clark leaves a team of venture capitalists and A-list engineers to sweat over Healtheon's "Magic Diamond," a crudely drawn sketch that puts him in the middle of a $1.5 trillion-a-year business. Through its impulsive subject, The New New Thing shrewdly depicts a radical shift in how business is done, with power moving from the crisply suited Organization Man to anarchic free-thinkers and a surreal climate in which the companies that have yet to show a profit have the most money thrown at them. Among his seemingly endless supply of potent analogies, Lewis compares Clark to a dealmaker worthy of Marlon Brando, who "[shows] up on the set for a few days and strolls away with half the budget." Viewed by the author with equal parts awe and contempt, Clark represents nothing short of the future itself: exciting, volatile, and maddeningly unpredictable.