Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species
By Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio
MIT Press, 240 pp., $29.95

Scene 1: Tom Ashbrook, a Boston Globe foreign correspondent, and his former college roommate Rolly Rouse are running through the woods of Newton, Mass., "laughing like idiots and whooping and slapping trees." They're so high on their plan to become Internet entrepreneurs that Tom is "hopping up on a big rock, pissing a long arc into the woods, laughing and crowing like a goofy rooster."

Scene 2, two years later: Rolly has left the office with chest pain and numbness in his left arm. Tom, whose wife will shortly send him e-mail saying that she has been vomiting in the bathroom with stress over their dire financial picture, is banging away on his computer in a daze. "A little light was finally coming on somewhere deep in my mind, " Tom later writes. "[Rolly] could be dead. He could have broken himself over this dream."