http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/07/joshua_cohen_s_book_of_numbers_reviewed.html

In Joshua Cohen’s new novel, Book of Numbers, a struggling writer named Joshua Cohen is hired to ghostwrite the autobiography of Joshua Cohen, a Jobsian tech guru whose vast empire, Tetration, was founded on the invention of search. The writer character Joshua is almost 40, which makes him a little older than his author, though both were born in the pre-digital age—members, as I am too, of the generation that knew tech in its infancy, from that printer paper with the perforated strip down the sides to the “Information Superhighway” to Mosaic and Encarta and chatrooms. All of which now seems inspiringly anarchic, if not downright quaint. Book of Numbers is partly a history of how we got from there to here, and partly a warning about where we’re heading: Tetration is an obvious ringer for Google, with a bit of Apple thrown in, and minus Google’s loopy, good humored facade. After traveling to Palo Alto for some light indoctrination, narrator Joshua Cohen tags along with billionaire Joshua Cohen—helpfully referred to, for comprehension’s sake, as “Principal” throughout—on a tour of Europe and the United Arab Emirates, getting the scoop on Tetration’s murky origins and eventually too on the motives, murkier still, that underlie the reclusive Principal’s decision to talk.