Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: A Love Story

by Fred Moody

Book Overview

Founded in 1851 as a four-cabin outpost named "New York Pretty-Soon," Seattle has long struggled with an identity crisis. From a nearly lawless port, to a sedate, conventional company town defined by Boeing Aircraft, to an accessible paradise for artists and recovering urbanites, Seattle repeatedly tried and failed to become bigger, wealthier, more like "major league" cities. In the late 1980s, Seattle's time suddenly arrived. Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312304218
• ISBN13: 9780312304218
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Fred Moody brings out the tru story of Seattle

I read this book from cover to cover with great interest. Being an English Major and a life-long journalist, Moody writes with great precision and passion. Moody is a Seattler in his heart and soul and he knows the ins and outs of the city and he brings out the best and the worst of the city he loves. The flow of his writing and the episodes in the city's history he writes on would make one love Seattle as much as he does.

Fred Nail's the Seattle Mentality

So I moved to Seattle in the early 80's and didn't become a millionaire either. But I'm not whining about it. I think Fred mixes up the people he hung out with, the exec's of these dot-com bust companies with the minions of others who toiled away. Fred, not everybody else became a millionaire while you wrote newspaper articles. Ok, so the book is cool in that it covered about 1/2 of the companies in Seattle I've either worked for, or who had friends who worked there. So its fun to read Fred's persective on it. And the arts community, well I never hung out with them, so that part is cool as well. Plus that very wild statue that is now in his front yard is well, not for me but I liked the whole story about how it came to be. But the whining about everybody else is making a million while I live in a house on Bainbridge Island gets a little old. I bet his family loves him and he rarely had to put up with a "real" job for the last 25 years. Besides which I bet that house is now worth 4x what he paid for it. Enough of the poor me. In the end everybody is dead anyway. Life a decent life and have fun. The inside scoop on the Seattle Weekly is interesting but I guess I knew most of it, (I too read "The Stranger" instead now). And in part he's wrong, there still is a Seattle sprit in this city, although there is always an element of danger with drunks and weapons in any city. We still help strangers with directions and no I don't invite them over for dinner the first time I meet them. But try that in NYC! The views of the Mts are always great, hiking is still only an hour away, the sailing is fantastic. If you move here and want to become a "Seattleite" join one or more of the outdoor clubs, Cascade Bike Club, the Mountaineers. Don't wait for people to invite you to a party, invite one or two of your new friends to lunch or dinner. In short be the friend you want others to be. Don't whine about the rain, don't say where I came from is so much better. No one wants to hear that. Heck that works in most cities. See ya out there.

The fall and rise of Invisible Seattle

This remarkable and memorable book starts out masquerading as a capsule history of Seattle. It becomes even more engrossing, however, as it subtly becomes an autobiography. Ultimately, it's not only about how Seattle wrestled with "the demons of ambition," it's about Fred Moody's personal battle with them too.For most of his life, Fred Moody's outlook paralleled that of his hometown (as he describes it): low-stress, low-ambition, make enough to get by while leaving time to enjoy the beautiful outdoors, don't cause hassles for other people, be proud about how you're not like people in other parts of the country. Over time, however, as his city gets caught up in an economic boom spurred by the very non-Seattle ambitions of people and corporations like Microsoft, Starbucks, and even Dale Chihuly, Fred finds himself increasingly dissatisfied with his life at the "Seattle Weekly." He gives in to his demons too, and dives into the dot-com world.Along the way, Moody gives us some fascinating and insightful portraits of people and episodes in Seattle's history -- not just the examples mentioned above, but also Seattle icon Ivar Haglund, Sub Pop Records and the "grunge" movement, and the life and (essential) death of the "Weekly" itself. Perhaps most memorable and moving is his portrayal of Seattle sculptor James Acord, whose magnum opus, "Monstrance for a Grey Horse," is now permanently installed in Moody's own front yard.These character sketches are a fascinating part of Moody's book. Ultimately most memorable, though, is his portrait of Seattle itself ... its past and its present, what it used to be and what, he argues, it has become today. In the receding tide of the dot-com wave, Moody sees the re-emergence of some of the essential characteristics of what he calls Invisible Seattle. It's a hopeful sign -- if you share the author's essential outlook -- that what really makes Seattle "Seattle" hasn't been entirely lost. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves this city, or who just wants to understand it a little better. It made a big difference to me.

Accurate Picture of Seattle

Fred Moody has painted an accurate picture of Seattle and its character. Seldom am I as moved by a non-fiction book as much as I was with this one. Part history and part Fred's own personal journey through the dotcom boom and bust--I had a hard time putting it down. I'm a Californian who fled the bay area in 1998 to come to Seattle to work for Microsoft at the height of the dotcom boom. I met and married my husband a third generation Seattleite having met him in front of Doc Maynard's night club (a famous Seattlin that Fred also profiles). I started at Microsoft in time to attend a bunch of retirement parties and was amazed to see "kids" fleeing this place for places like HomeGrocer.com because they weren't going to get rich enough fast enough. I thought they were nuts and then the party crashed. This is a great town and a wonderful region. Thank you Fred for capturing my adopted home so accurately. You also helped me understand my husband's character a bit better.

The history of Seattle in the context of the dot.com fallout

What a wonderful book! I grew up in Seattle, and having left 10 years ago and experienced life outside my hometown, I was amazed to see Moody put into print the very emotional love/hate relationship I have with the city, and the distant perspective that greed has ruined it forever. I come home often for business and to see family, and always experience the longing for home and the breathtaking natural beauty, while loathing the fact that the area has become more like your average East Coast city in terms of traffic and pace. It seems Seattle traded its innocence in the pursuit of greed. In the last place one would want to sell-out, it has seemed to me from my viewpoint that they did in droves. One thing about this book for the average reader, if you didn't grow up here you will probably not "get it". I loved the fact that for the first time I have ever seen, someone actually understands the natural lighting of the area. The soft and luminous backlighting that displays greens so deep you swear the plants are lit from within. The soft grayness that always made me feel safe and welcome. No wonder that my favorite days in sunny Colorado are in fact rainy ones. To an outsider, the constant winter rain is depressing, but to one who really experienced it, it simply is the weather that makes everything the city is about make sense. A world without sharp edges.His depictions of the siren song of the fast paced world of Microsoft were simply scary. It is truly frightening at the ease in which one can get caught up in the looking glass world of the lure of money, and the drug-like addiction to always being on the verge of the next best thing. Even a lifelong anti-establishment journalist like himself got caught up in it. This insider look at the underbelly and reality that is the Microsoft culture of excitement and boundless ambition is the best depiction I have seen of the psychological hold the culture has on people. I too have spent the last 20 years with contrasting bits of envy at the lucky ones whose normal work made them millions, and appalled at the sell-your-soul tradeoff it seemed to require. Moody sums it up well on page 250 when speaking of a friend whose relationship broke up due to the disparity of buying power after one of the two made millions and retired at 31, by saying "I knew what she was feeling because I felt it myself: an unpalatable, unenduring mix of horror, envy, disgust, and prurience."I loved the inside look at the Sub-pop scene, and the fast cycle of growth and decay of the "Seattle grunge sound" and the mainstream charade it became. It is always strange to see people you went to high school with depicted in a history of Seattle, having played a role in its cultural history.Moody has done a brilliant job at depicting the change of a city and its culture. From the WTO disaster to the mainstreaming of Seattle icons like Starbucks, he tells of innocence and purity designed and lost somewhere along the way. As for when and