Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: From Boom to Bust in the Number One City of the Future

by Fred Moody

Praise for Fred Moody's previous books:

"An engrossing, sometimes horrifying, fly-on-the wall account of the men, the women, and the work of VR in the Seattle area in the mid-1990s."
- The Wall Street Journal on The Visionary Position

"Mr. Moody has done a remarkable reporting job and written a first-rate work of narrative description, rendering the look and feel of life inside Microsoft... he has succeeded admirably."
- The New York Times Book Review on I Sing the Body Electronic

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography

319 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Kristianne]

When I returned to Seattle after three years away I discovered two conflicting opinions of discontent broiling in the streets of the city. In the pages of the alternative urbanite darling, The Stranger, I found that beloved shops, clubs and other community spots were being razed to make way for the condos that were apparently in demand from our monied neighbors. In the pages of Seattle Magazine I read that the city was rife with dirty homeless drug dealers. Apparently, people who had never feared danger in New York City were terrified of the early morning Seattle corners filled as they were with the ramshackle shelters of the poor. We were at once being attacked by the unimaginative leech of wealth and mass development and being threatened by the sloth and indolence of underprivileged. Either way, we were headed nowhere good pretty fast.

This conflicting concern for the city’s character and direction is nothing new among Seattleites. We always seem shocked by what is happening in the city and are constantly trying to identify the place in the face of the influences from the world outside and the unexpected developments from within. I have heard people state amazing facts about Seattle being given abnormally high ratings in standard of living, book consumption or some other cultured pursuit. I have also heard the same people rant viciously about the city’s systemic problems in government, policy and style. Reading Fred Moody’s book Seattle and the Demons of Ambition made me realize that this perpetual conflict of pride and scorn is nothing new. In his book he chronicles the history of the city as he experiences it from his childhood in the 1960’s through the peaks and valleys of boom and bust that the city constantly cycled through up to the present. He discusses the origins of Seattle in Maynard Town, already full of the confliction of ambition and the pretense of carelessness. Moody feels that the true character of his Seattle is definitively casual and unambitious. Moody’s city is home of the content loser, which made it an ideal home for grunge and made entities like Starbucks, Microsoft and Amazon.com feel anomalous. The book is a nice peek at life on the ground during the early nineties when Seattle’s public image was booming across the nation. Moody provides fascinating portraits of Bill Gates, the Chihuly industry, Seattle Weekly’s David Brewster and Kurt Cobain, Van Conner and other grunge mavens. While the book is essentially about Moody’s own experiences in Seattle through a couple high-speed decades of growth, he writes with a journalistic finesse that allows his personal experience to steer the story but never to bog it down. The exception would be his harping on the true character of Seattle that he watched languish under the blinding rush of the city’s fortune and fame. But, this flaw is one I see more as an endemic condition of Seattleites than a unique issue for Moody.

[jillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am an ex-Seattleite, and I lived there on and off for years - and yeah, this nails it. THIS guy is from the Northwest, and he GETS being from Seattle, and he understands that most people in Seattle really didn't want America to notice that the city was there. He chronicles the city's business and music and civic history over the last thirty years, does a brilliant job of tying everything together, and, most importantly, devotes a few pages to Ivar Haglund.

[Kyla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic history of Seattle in the past few decades

[Jeffrey Powanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

A boisterous, curmudgeonly, and highly personal cultural and civic history of the boom and bust cycle in Seattle in the 1980s and 1990s. It's one of the most enjoyable books I've read about Seattle. It covers some well-known Seattle stories, such as the meteoric rise of Microsoft, Starbucks, and Amazon, the short-lived grunge music period and the success of Sub Pop records, efforts to build new stadiums for both the Mariners and the Seahawks, the showmanship and celebrity of glassmaker Dale Chihuly, and the violent and disruptive WTO protests in 1999, and some lesser known Seattle stories, such as the slow-motion decline of alternative newsweekly The Weekly (now called Seattle Weekly, which since 2019 has been a web-only publication, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer), the efforts of former Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen to develop the Seattle Commons in the South Lake Union neighborhood, and the colorful exploits of William J. "Joey" King and Michael "Squish" Almquist in the founding of F5 (a maker of load balancing software). But even more entertaining are Moody's offbeat stories of Seattle founder Doc Maynard, colorful restaurateur and seafood purveyor Ivar Haglund, and eccentric sculptor James Acord and his decades long project to complete his controversial work Monstrance for a Grey Horse.

Moody's narrative of a city wallowing for two decades in unchecked ambition and greed is wildly entertaining. I've worked for several high-tech companies, including in the Seattle area, and I think Moody has captured how disruptive a company's enormous success can be to the livelihood and sustainability of a large city.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed Moody’s lively account, I have five complaints about the book:
- (1). I wish Moody had dedicated some space to the biotech industry, which also went through boom and bust cycles during that same period and remains a significant part of the Seattle economy.
- (2). I wish he’d chosen to spend a year embedded with Microsoft’s OS or applications teams instead of the multimedia encyclopedia division because Microsoft Encarta, despite its brief success, was ultimately eclipsed by Wikipedia and is now forgotten.
- (3). I wish that Moody explored the history of Washington's lack of a personal or corporate income tax, one of the primary reasons Jeff Bezos chose Seattle instead of Santa Cruz, CA as the location for Amazon’s headquarters. To this day, Seattle has difficulty addressing the problems of “lesser Seattle” due to the state’s absurdly regressive tax structure.
- (4). I wish that Moody discussed reforms to corporate equity compensation. Stock options granted by high tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon contributed to vast income inequality and concentrated immense wealth among executives and a small number of high-level employees. In the wake of the Enron and Worldcom financial scandals, the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 improved corporate governance, accountability, and financial transparency, forcing corporations to make changes to their equity compensation programs. For instance, in 2003, the very same year this book was published, Microsoft decided to stop issuing stock options, replacing them with Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) for employees. RSUs provide tangible value, vest over a longer period than stock options, and have simpler tax consequences.
- (5). Surprised the ebook has no photos. It really could have used a few.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure what I learned. Seattle had a laid back past, and now is ambitious? It seems big enough to contain multitudes.

[Matthew Ciarvella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I moved to the PNW a scant few months ago (May 2015, to be precise) and I've been doing a lot of reading about my adopted city. Most of it has been pretty demoralizing; Knute Berger's book made me feel as though my new home didn't really want me. (Side note: it was a delight to see Berger pop up in this book, if only for a few pages).

Moody's book was the one I was looking for in all of my reading. He's the one I'd recommend to anyone going through this newcomer's journey. Moody just "gets it," as they say, but he gets it in a way that doesn't make the newcomer such as myself feel like it's entirely the fault of people like me that things are different now.

Moody's book wanders across the time and space of Seattle's history and he was there for some pretty tumultuous changes. He writes about Microsoft in those early days and what it felt like. He lived through the dotcom boom and then the crash. It all gives his reflection an honest quality and an authentic one.

And the subtitle "A Love Story" really is quite accurate, with all the trappings of a love story: interest, romance, infatuation, and then depression, and then finally redemption.

All in all, I'm glad that I read this book.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having recently moved to Seattle, a friend recommended this book. Overall, I found it an interesting perspective on the city from a long-time observer. I enjoyed the first half of the book more, which focuses on the slacker anti-ambitious arts & culture crowd the author belongs to. The second half, documenting the rise of Microsoft and the tech boom, was far less insightful, featuring redundant navel-gazing bromides of the noble author as intellectual and his distaste and reluctance to embrace the influx of money and economic change.

[Ryan Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting story of Seattle both in it's early days and in the height of the dot.com boom. Moody does a great job describing the city, it's founders and the tech players who made it into the empire of business it is today. I really enjoyed this look into the behind the scenes early days of companies like Microsoft and Amazon and the uniqueness of Seattle that has bred these types of businesses and created great success along with epic failures.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are sections of intrigue (for example, parts on James Acord and his sculpture Monstrance for a Grey Horse), and there are dramatic events where the impact is palpable (for example, Moody's decision on whether to apply to a job posting at a certain tech company). For the most part, this book read as a long-winded lamentation of Seattle's cyclical boom-bust history. I found much of it insightful, but it was mostly a slog to read by the end.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moody is an excellent writer who takes a detached and detailed tour through quite a variety of people and places in the last 30 years.

There's the topics you would expect--Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, the Seahawks, Mariners.. but he also devotes some insightful coverage to a group of lesser known startups, sculpters, and artists.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great discussion of Seattle's recent history, from someone who watched Microsoft, SubPop records, Amazon and others blow up into fame and fortune with feelings of deep ambivalence. Moody is very smart, but a little, say, moody. His ambivalence mirrors my own on many fronts, and I felt a great connection reading this. I may look him up.

[JulieK · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't regret reading this but found it pretty tiresome by the end. The author abused some memoir conventions and the tone alternated between snarky and whiny. A lot of the book seemed like it was just recycling pieces he had written for the Weekly. But all that said, it was interesting to look at the recent history of Seattle and how the tech boom and bust changed the city.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book that weaves together the worlds of Microsoft & grunge music and the idealism of the 1960's to shed light on what makes Seattle unique.

[Logophile (Heather) · Rating 3 out of 5]

More detail will follow.

There were part of this book I found awfully slow but it was a great stroll down memory lane as well as an insightful point of view on local events.

[Patrick Gibbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for any transplant to Seattle in the new millennium. This fun, quick witted read will tell you why the city is what it is today and how it got there.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learned a lot about the city I have called home for about 3 years.