The Nudist on the Late Shift

Po Bronson caught the dot-com era at full sprint and wrote it down in vivid, character-driven vignettes before the whole thing collapsed. The Sabeer Bhatia story alone — an immigrant founder who held Bill Gates to $400 million for Hotmail — is worth the price of admission. Bronson's prose is journalistic and energetic, and he has a gift for finding the human story inside the business story. The caveat is that this book is a time capsule, not a blueprint. The late-1990s moment it documents is gone, and some of the mythology it celebrates didn't survive the bust. The title is mildly provocative but the content is clean professional journalism, suitable for mature teens and up. A durable portrait of a singular historical moment in American entrepreneurship.