Hard

The anti–Vietnam War and draft-resistance movements. March on the Pentagon in 1967. Woodstock. Larry Flynt breaking taboos with Hustler. Birth of publishing empires that covered the nascent PC industry. Meteoric rise of Sun Microsystems. These are some of the seminal events of the twentieth century’s last half in which author John Barry participated. HARD is the story of Baby Boomer Barry’s odyssey from editing a boosterish community newspaper owned by a man who had been active in CREEP (Committee to Reelect the President [Nixon]), to slaving in Flynt’s smut mines, to helping ramp up and run pioneering personal-computer publications Microcomputing and InfoWorld, to working for disruptive Sun Microsystems and coauthoring the definitive book about the company.Along this hard road, he encountered a disparate cast of characters, from a CREERy sunlight-shunner, to drug-addled editors, to pornmongers, to tech industry titans. In his improbable and unconventional career trajectory, he worked for shady, shifty, eccentric publishing and tech magnates from coast to coast. And survived to tell the story.