Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

It's a subject ripe for satire: a young literary woman leaves publishing to try out tech in San Francisco and gets drawn into the money and ambition of Silicon Valley. But Wiener's memoir, sharp-tongued as it sometimes is—of the photos on a first date's Instagram feed, she writes, "They were, I had to admit, very high resolution"—is more melancholy than that. She finds that she likes most of the people she meets, even the CEOs, and in her eyes, the intermingled idealism and greed (the latter often disguised as the former) of her cohort—or rather the cohort around her that is hoovering up money while she's just grateful to have a decent health plan—come across as deeply human characteristics, though no less sad and disturbing for it.