BOOK OF THE WEEK
Source Code by Bill Gates (Allen Lane £25, 336pp)
When Bill Gates was nine, a therapist said he was ‘retarded’. He wasn’t bad at his lessons. It was his voice – he was squeaky.
She recommended he be held back a year while she taught him how to develop a ‘big daddy-bear voice’. She made him pronounce the letter ‘r’ as he licked peanut butter off a bread stick.
Just over a decade later, Gates had co-founded Microsoft, got into every university he applied to (except Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but then only because he couldn’t be bothered to go to the interview) and was hurrying on to become the world’s richest man.
Source Code is a good title for this gentle, pensive autobiography. Gates likes the idea of self-digitalisation. He marks even that early act of therapeutic child abuse as useful because it added a bit to his thirst for independent thinking, which would later prove so useful to him.
Another teacher, spotting a glimmer of the…
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