Sunnyvale : The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family

"Hi, it's Jeff." Silence. "Your grandson," I added.
"Oh. Yes. Jeff. How are you?"
I told him I'd like to stop by and introduce him to my wife.
"Great," he said, sounding genuinely surprised. "Why don't you come by and pet the robots?"

In Sunnyvale, California, in 1979, Jeff Goodell's family lived quietly on Meadowlark Lane, unaware that their town was soon to become ground zero in the digital revolution. Then one day his mother announced that she and his father were divorcing after twenty years of marriage. Big deal, thought Jeff. "Everybody we knew was splitting up-it was the romantic equivalent of the pet-rock craze." Over the next decade, Silicon Valley boomed, and the Goodell family unraveled. Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family is the story of a fragile, all-too-ordinary family caught at the epicenter of one of the great economic, cultural, and technological explosions in recent history.

After the divorce, Goodell's mother went to work for a little company called Apple Computer and began her ascent into the new world; his father, a landscape contractor who valued plants and trees over bits and bytes, found himself alone and falling farther and farther behind. For the Goodell children, the aftershocks brought pain and confusion: Jeff ran off to Lake Tahoe and the fast track to nowhere; his younger brother, Jerry, began a nightmarish descent into drugs, alcohol, and sexual experimentation; and eleven-year-old Jill bounced between two houses, struggling to make sense of her shattered world.

Watching it all was grandfather Leonard Goodell, a Westinghouse ur-geek who-even in his late seventies-still had enough mental horsepower to work as a lead engineer in a robotics factory. But as Leonard watched his son's family fall apart, he realized his worldly success had not come without a human cost, and near the end of his life he began his own quest for forgiveness and redemption.

Sunnyvale is a portrait of a way of life that is no more, in a place where progress runs wild. It is about individuals struggling to make lives for themselves in a brutally Darwinian world. Above all, it is about what we owe to the people we love. A unique and compelling family story, it is also a resonant document of our age.

Jeff Goodell is the author of The Cyberthief and the Samurai. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Wired, and GQ. A fourth-generation Californian, he now lives in upstate New York. He can be e-mailed at jg@well.com.