From a Los Angeles Times review by Sam Dean of the book by Malcolm Harris titled “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World”:

Malcolm Harris had the good luck to grow up in Palo Alto, a blessed piece of real estate in the American economy, lit by both the sun of Silicon Valley and the rosy sandstone glow of the Stanford University campus.

He also had the good luck to make it out alive. In the years Harris attended Palo Alto High, students killed themselves at a rate between four and five times the national average, walking to their deaths on the train tracks that Leland Stanford built to escape the labor unrest of San Francisco more than 100 years earlier.