Tim Lapetino's book "The Art of Atari" is full of eye candy for anyone who grew up in the '70s and '80s -- especially if you gazed at those game boxes that had illustrations which barely resembled the blips on screen. But the book also tells the story of how Atari invented the video game console as we know it, along with the idea of a Silicon Valley start-up and a billion dollar industry -- until Atari gobbled too much, ran smack into its own ghosts and flattened into a yellow pancake. With Steve Hendricks and Barney Huang.
