“Compelling, timely, and thoughtfully written.”
—Booklist
“A well-informed, granular account of San Francisco's history since 1990, and a portrait of how it has served as a microcosm of some of the fundamental changes occurring in U.S. society during that time… With all its triumphs and travails, it is impossible to leave this account without a strong sense that what Weber calls the ‘boom-and-bust cycles’ of San Francisco life are destined to repeat yet again.”
—Shelf Awareness
"A welcome history of Bay Area Big Tech."
—Kirkus
“Enlightening... A timely, cautionary tale about what tech cannot fix.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Having spent the 1990s and early 2000s at the heart of the story Jonathan Weber tells here—working at Wired and HotWired, living in San Francisco at the peak of the dot-com boom—you can take it from me: This book is the real deal. Imbued with insider access, outsider perspective, and Weber's prodigious story-telling gifts, City on the Edge is the definitive account of a monumental era in a mythical city and a world-changing industry that both lost their way.”
—John Heilemann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Game Change and Double Down
“So much that happens in the nation happens in San Francisco first. Jonathan Weber tells the city’s story from the rise of the internet and the behemoth powers that followed through to the national political figures the city has spawned—with, along the way, a cast of vivid and Machiavellian behind-the-scenes players. He has made it a riveting tale and turned San Francisco into an unforgettable character.”
—Michael Wolff, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fire and Fury
“To understand the San Francisco of today, you can’t do better than Jonathan Weber’s chronicle of its recent decades of euphoria and disillusion. In his fast-paced narrative, Weber shrewdly navigates the city’s volatile juxtaposition of transformational innovation and intractable social ills. City on the Edge is a captivating story of iron-willed idealists, inventors, activists, and power players who shaped San Francisco’s contentious character, altered how we all live and work, and inflamed the most fractious political debates of our time.”
—Marty Baron, author of Collision of Power and former executive editor of The Washington Post
“From the beginning of the rise of the commercial Internet to today, Jonathan Weber has been in the middle of everything San Francisco–related, including technology and politics. In this beautiful book, he interweaves the two and shows how they've played off each other, both in positive and negative ways, in a city whose history is both fantastical and entertaining.”
—Brad Feld, co-founder of Foundry Group and Techstars
“Jonathan Weber tells the story of San Francisco’s internet era as someone who was there and who knows everyone. He digs deep into tech, culture, and politics, revealing much that was never well known and much which has been forgotten. City on the Edge offers a story that affects the world and human history.”
—Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist