In January 2011, a 19-year-old in Palo Alto died by suicide on the train tracks running through town, part of a disturbing, decade-long pattern of deaths of despair in the wealthy heart of Silicon Valley. The same week, a 19-year-old Chinese worker at Foxconn, the company that built iPhones, also died by suicide, part of a series of deaths among young people working on the grueling assembly lines at one of China’s most famous tech manufacturers. Palo Alto, a new book by the American author Malcolm Harris, attempts to understand the connection between these patterns of suicide at two different...