Close to the Machine - by Ellen Ullman (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published in 1997 by City Lights Books. First Picador paperback edition, 2012.

Book Synopsis

When Ellen Ullman's memoir of her life as a software engineer was published in 1997, it was greeted as a revelatory meditation on the dawn of the digital era. Now, twenty-five years later, Close to the Machine is a true classic, a touchstone work that illuminates our time and our future life in technology.

It is the story of a woman whose life is spinning out of control. Technology becomes her unlikely lifeline. As she navigates this socially flawed and male-dominated world, Ullman shows us the struggle of translating the messiness of human thought into algorithms, and also discovers unexpected beauty in the logic of code.

Review Quotes

"Astonishing...Impossible to put down." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Close to the Machine may be the best---it's certainly the most human---book to have emerged thus far from the culture of Silicon Valley. Ullman is that rarity, a computer programmer with a poet's feeling for language." --Laura Miller, Salon

"Part memoir, part techie mantra, part observation on the ever-changing world of computer science...[Ullman is] a strong woman standing up to, and facing down, 'obsolescence' in two different, particularly unforgiving worlds---modern technology and modern society." --The New York Times Book Review

"Fascinating...Chock-full of delicately profound insights into work, money, love, and the search for a life that matters." --Newsweek

"Ullman comes with her tech bona fides intact (she is, after all, a seasoned software engineer). But she also comes with novel material....We see the seduction at the heart of programming: embedded in the hijinks and hieroglyphics are the esoteric mysteries of the human mind." --Wired

"This book is a little masterpiece....I have never read anything like it." --Andrei Codrescu

"For someone sitting so close to the machine, Ellen Ullman possesses a remarkably wide-angle perspective on the technology culture she inhabits." --The Village Voice

About the Author

Ellen Ullman wrote her first computer program in 1978. She went on to have a twenty-year career as a programmer and software engineer. Her essays and books have become landmark works describing the social, emotional, and personal effects of technology. She is the author of the novels By Blood, a New York Times Notable Book; and The Bug, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her memoir, Close to the Machine, about her life as a software engineer during the internet's first rise, became a cult classic. She is based in San Francisco.