-
Uncanny Valley
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Suehyla El-Attar
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $18.89
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
No Filter
- The Inside Story of Instagram
- By: Sarah Frier
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing, Sarah Frier
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a photo-sharing app called Instagram, with one simple but irresistible feature: It would make anything you captured look more beautiful. The cofounders cultivated a community of photographers and artisans around the app, and it quickly went mainstream. In less than two years, it caught Facebook’s attention: Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for a historic one billion dollars when Instagram had only 13 employees.
-
-
Well Told Story of the Rise and Reach of Instagram
- By Jenny Jenkins on 05-03-20
By: Sarah Frier
-
Crying in H Mart
- A Memoir
- By: Michelle Zauner
- Narrated by: Michelle Zauner
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian-American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
-
-
Broken Korean
- By Tim on 04-21-21
By: Michelle Zauner
-
Shakespeare in a Divided America
- What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Read at school by almost every student, staged in theaters across the land, and long highly valued by both conservatives and liberals alike, Shakespeare's plays are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries now, Americans of all stripes - presidents and activists, writers and soldiers - have turned to Shakespeare's works to address the nation's political fault lines, such as manifest destiny, race, gender, immigration, and free speech.
-
-
An Entertaining History Lesson
- By David on 08-17-20
By: James Shapiro
-
Empire of Pain
- The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
- By: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Narrated by: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Length: 18 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The prize-winning and best-selling author of Say Nothing presents a grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.
-
-
Full Account of the Sackler Conspiracy
- By Edward Bisch on 04-13-21
-
Hidden Valley Road
- Inside the Mind of an American Family
- By: Robert Kolker
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their 12 children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins - aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic.
-
-
A story you've never heard before
- By Kelley Cox on 04-19-20
By: Robert Kolker
-
Trick Mirror
- Reflections on Self-Delusion
- By: Jia Tolentino
- Narrated by: Jia Tolentino
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity.
-
-
Couldn’t stop listening
- By Alice on 08-25-19
By: Jia Tolentino
-
No Filter
- The Inside Story of Instagram
- By: Sarah Frier
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing, Sarah Frier
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a photo-sharing app called Instagram, with one simple but irresistible feature: It would make anything you captured look more beautiful. The cofounders cultivated a community of photographers and artisans around the app, and it quickly went mainstream. In less than two years, it caught Facebook’s attention: Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for a historic one billion dollars when Instagram had only 13 employees.
-
-
Well Told Story of the Rise and Reach of Instagram
- By Jenny Jenkins on 05-03-20
By: Sarah Frier
-
Crying in H Mart
- A Memoir
- By: Michelle Zauner
- Narrated by: Michelle Zauner
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian-American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
-
-
Broken Korean
- By Tim on 04-21-21
By: Michelle Zauner
-
Shakespeare in a Divided America
- What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Read at school by almost every student, staged in theaters across the land, and long highly valued by both conservatives and liberals alike, Shakespeare's plays are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries now, Americans of all stripes - presidents and activists, writers and soldiers - have turned to Shakespeare's works to address the nation's political fault lines, such as manifest destiny, race, gender, immigration, and free speech.
-
-
An Entertaining History Lesson
- By David on 08-17-20
By: James Shapiro
-
Empire of Pain
- The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
- By: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Narrated by: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Length: 18 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The prize-winning and best-selling author of Say Nothing presents a grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.
-
-
Full Account of the Sackler Conspiracy
- By Edward Bisch on 04-13-21
-
Hidden Valley Road
- Inside the Mind of an American Family
- By: Robert Kolker
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their 12 children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins - aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic.
-
-
A story you've never heard before
- By Kelley Cox on 04-19-20
By: Robert Kolker
-
Trick Mirror
- Reflections on Self-Delusion
- By: Jia Tolentino
- Narrated by: Jia Tolentino
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity.
-
-
Couldn’t stop listening
- By Alice on 08-25-19
By: Jia Tolentino
-
The Power
- By: Naomi Alderman
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Power, the world is a recognizable place: There's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power: They can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.
-
-
A necessary read
- By Grace on 11-22-17
By: Naomi Alderman
-
Whistleblower
- My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber
- By: Susan Fowler
- Narrated by: Susan Fowler
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Susan decided to share her story, she was fully aware of the consequences most women faced for speaking out about harassment prior to the #MeToo era. But, as her inspiring memoir, Whistleblower, reveals, this courageous act was entirely consistent with Susan's young life so far: a life characterized by extraordinary determination, a refusal to accept things as they are, and the desire to do what is good and right. When she was told, after discovering the pervasive culture of sexism, harassment, racism, and abuse at Uber, that she was the problem, she banded together with other women to try to make change.
-
-
So inspiring
- By TLH ~ 🎧 ~ on 03-06-20
By: Susan Fowler
-
When We Cease to Understand the World
- By: Benjamin Labatut, Adrian West - translator
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence.
-
-
Phenomenal Stories About Ultra Geniuses
- By Z on 12-08-21
By: Benjamin Labatut, and others
-
Steve Jobs
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Dylan Baker
- Length: 25 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
-
-
Interesting man
- By Jeanne on 11-13-11
By: Walter Isaacson
-
The Everything Store
- Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
- By: Brad Stone
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.
-
-
Loved the honesty!
- By Paul on 01-29-14
By: Brad Stone
-
Disrupted
- My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
- By: Dan Lyons
- Narrated by: Dan Lyons
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An instant New York Times best seller, Dan Lyons' "hysterical" (Recode) memoir, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "the best book about Silicon Valley," takes listeners inside the maddening world of fad-chasing venture capitalists, sales bros, social climbers, and sociopaths at today's tech startups. For 25 years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his profession - until one Friday morning when he received a phone call: Poof. His job no longer existed. "I think they just want to hire younger people," his boss at Newsweek told him.
-
-
Don't drink the Kool Aid
- By Margaret on 07-03-16
By: Dan Lyons
-
Super Pumped
- The Battle for Uber
- By: Mike Isaac
- Narrated by: Holter Graham, Mike Isaac
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A New York Times technology correspondent presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against the rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley during the mobile era. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a pause-resisting story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic 12-month periods in American corporate history.
-
-
Entertaining, but author clearly has an agenda
- By Josh on 11-18-19
By: Mike Isaac
-
How I Built This
- The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
- By: Guy Raz
- Narrated by: Guy Raz
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Great ideas often come from a simple spark: A soccer player on the New Zealand national team notices all the unused wool his country produces and figures out a way to turn them into shoes (Allbirds). A former Buddhist monk decides the very best way to spread his mindfulness teachings is by launching an app (Headspace). A sandwich cart vendor finds a way to reuse leftover pita bread and turns it into a multimillion-dollar business (Stacy’s Pita Chips).
-
-
GET THIS BOOK!
- By Mattye LaSuer on 01-16-21
By: Guy Raz
-
Titan
- The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
- By: Ron Chernow
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 35 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller’s exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book indelibly alters our image of this most enigmatic capitalist. Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world’s richest man by creating America’s most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Branded "the Octopus" by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America.
-
-
WOW! What a fascinating story!
- By martha on 12-17-13
By: Ron Chernow
-
Atlas Shrugged
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
- Length: 52 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world - and did. Is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he fight his hardest battle not against his enemies, but against the woman he loves? Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's magnum opus and launched an ideology and a movement. With the publication of this work in 1957, Rand gained an instant following and became a phenomenon.
-
-
Atlas Shrugged - Christopher Hurt
- By Kindle Customer on 03-19-09
By: Ayn Rand
-
Bad Feminist
- Essays
- By: Roxane Gay
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman ( Sweet Valley High) of color ( The Help) while also taking listeners on a ride through culture of the last few years ( Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown).
-
-
"I am a mess of contradictions" - RG
- By Cynthia on 12-27-15
By: Roxane Gay
-
The Four
- The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
- By: Scott Galloway
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are the four most influential companies on the planet. Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. Just about everyone is wrong. For all that's been written about the Four over the last two decades, no one has captured their power and staggering success as insightfully as Scott Galloway. Instead of buying the myths these companies broadcast, Galloway asks fundamental questions.
-
-
Terrible book
- By "achuith" on 06-23-19
By: Scott Galloway
Publisher's Summary
A New York Times Best Seller
"Narrator Suehyla El-Attar has a strong voice for this memoir of a woman's journey into the mostly male world of tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. She is energetic, funny, and swift while telling the story of Anna Wiener's acculturation from book publishing in Manhattan to the dot-com boom in San Francisco." (AudioFile Magazine)
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a January 2020 IndieNext Pick. An Amazon Best Book of January. One of Vogue's 22 Books to Read this Winter, The Washington Post's 10 Books to Read in January, Elle's 12 Best Books to Read in 2020, The New York Times' 12 Books to Read in January, Esquire's 15 Best Winter Books, Paste's 10 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2020, and Entertainment Weekly's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020.
"A definitive document of a world in transition: I won't be alone in returning to Uncanny Valley for clarity and consolation for many years to come." (Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion)
The prescient account of a journey in Silicon Valley: A defining memoir of our digital age.
In her mid-20s, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener - stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial - left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: A world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress.
Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. But amid the company ski vacations and in-office speakeasies, boyish camaraderie and ride-or-die corporate fealty, a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: One in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building.
Part coming-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener’s memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. With wit, candor, and heart, Anna deftly charts the tech industry’s shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment.
Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.
A Macmillan Audio production from MCD
Critic Reviews
New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2020
Chicago Tribune Best Books of the Year, 2020
Los Angeles Times Holiday Books Guide, 2020
Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2020
Amazon.com Best Books of the Year, 2020
Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2020
"Narrator Suehyla El-Attar has a strong voice for this memoir of a woman's journey into the mostly male world of tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. She is energetic, funny, and swift while telling the story of Anna Wiener's acculturation from book publishing in Manhattan to the dot-com boom in San Francisco.... El-Attar's easy narrative style keeps us listening." (AudioFile Magazine)
More from the same
What listeners say about Uncanny Valley
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- R. Herz
- 01-20-20
Could have been better
Well-written and wonderfully read, but what a whiney memoir it turns out to be of an exciting time and place, and also — odd for so good a writer — how inadequate to what she apparently imagines as what should be her rage. I am sorry to say this, and I wanted more from the book.
What's good? Her style is well-wrought, strong throughout. And the reading its terrific.
What's not so good? Well, there is a problem with the narrator: Nothing is quite right for her, and, as she confesses repeatedly, although she is treated very well given her job, she is never convinced that this work in the tech trade is what she wants to do, or that her life or her trade has the virtue she thinks it should have, or that she is any good at it, or that the tech ethos is anything but corrupting. She avoids consideration about the societal implications of her choices, and her condemnations tend to the aesthetic or merely descriptive. She sees a homeless man wearing a sweatshirt from the company she works for, a beggar in swag. “It was the city’s socioeconomic gap personified, I said. It felt even more significant that the man in the light-rail station was black, and not just because San Francisco was losing its black population at a rapid clip. To my knowledge, the company had just two black employees.” Her co-worker listens to her story, described as "a novelistic apparition, a hallucination," and says, “I wonder whose it was … We’re not supposed to give away the hoodies.” I suppose that that's honest in its descriptiveness, and so I should be appreciative; but I wanted more. Stylistically, I found that "To my knowledge, the company had..." not a judgment but an afterthought, an "oh yeah and ..." moment.
Other quibbles: Her verbal pantomime with corporations becomes mere virtue signaling, tossing rocks from behind a fence — Facebook is the “social network everyone hated,” Edward Snowden is “the NSA whistleblower who was back in media,” Microsoft is the “highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate.” Her catalogue of offenses — discrimination, antisemitism, racism, sexism — become, in effect, mere lists, as she writes them down but does not engage with them except ironically and as things that make her uncomfortable. In fairness, at this point in the book, which is the second half of it, she is burned out. Not from the work, which she describes as work from home barely getting out of bed, but from her own lack of engagement in it, her uncertainty about what she wants to do with her life.
So, I say it again: the book is wonderfully written, witty through most of it, but the main character is surprisingly more self-centered and shallow than I had expected, and becomes wearying. It is callow when it should be engaged and fierce. Its style sometimes lapses into vacuous word games. All in all it could have been a much better effort for someone with her obvious writing talent. I look forward to her next book, however, which I am sure will be better.
16 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- J. Jones
- 01-27-20
Well written, yet pedantic and boring.
I found the content to be uninteresting.
The most fun I had was tracking down all of the unnamed companies.
Mixpanel - Analytics Company
Github - Open Source Company
Seattle Litigious Company - Microsoft
Social network everyone hates - Facebook
11 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- MHK
- 01-20-20
I was and am there
As a user experience designer living in San Francisco, this book 100% resonated with me. Anna Weiner perfectly captures the yearning, ennui and sense of disillusionment my friends and I now share, the feeling that this magical city is slipping away, and the continuing seduction of tech’s promise. Her portrait of startup culture as experienced by the semi-marginalized is startlingly accurate and beautifully written.
10 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Robyn E. Ellis
- 01-25-20
The point?
I’m not thoroughly entertained by this book and perhaps I’ve missed the point. A long commentary or critique of work in SF start up culture with snarky asides but little in the way of substance, insight, or suggestions. Not sure what is so relevant about this book or why it’s so popular but then I’m not unfamiliar with news and I tire of criticisms after 6+ hours but that’s just me.
6 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Glenn Canning
- 02-17-20
Nothing new
Interested in hearing the same 2-3 criticisms of the tech industry expanded upon for 8+ hours? Well, then this is the book for you. If, however, you’re already aware that tech (1) is dominated by men, (2) breeds homogeneity, and (3) comes with perks that ultimately bring out the worst in millennials, you won’t find anything in this story all that interesting. I don’t disagree with anything Weiner is arguing here, but I also don’t know why she (or anyone else) would write about her experience if it doesn’t offer any truly fresh insight- which is the hook that this memoir is being sold on.
Save yourself some time and just read any of the 1,000+ articles that have been written about problems with Silicon Valley- they offer everything Uncanny Valley does in a far more succinct package.
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- sandysummer
- 02-04-20
Paradigm Enriched
Born in 1947, TV didn’t arrive in my little valley until I was 9. Rotary wall, party line phones, inter... what? But I now have a fancy phone that I can ask questions and get lucid answers, WiFi runs my home and Entertainments. Anna, bless you for filling in much for me; a paradigm changer for sure. Thank you for your crisp, clear, vocabulary challenging, witty writing. Well done!
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Tails32x
- 01-24-20
An insight into Silicon Valley
A fascinating look into the toxic culture of Silicon Valley. There’s rarely anything surprising, but this story is told in fascinating prose that moves through scenes at a pretty rapid clip. Always fascinating, Weiner is here to rattle the industry even if it’s just a scream into an unheard abyss.
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- christie
- 01-26-20
Wonderful insight lovely writing
Some pearls in this book, especially in the beginning. The “bingo” episode is priceless. Wonderful view into Silicon Valley from a woman’s perspective and from the perspective of someone who hasn’t drunk the kool aid. In the end, a reminder of the value of three dimensions.
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Trevor Schulte
- 04-15-20
Writer decides to embrace Silicon Valley with a sour perspective
This story has been told by a few books. Dan Lyons “Disrupted” plays a much more positive
perspective and I believe I laughed a few times.
This story is about a girl in the publishing industry with no technical background entering the tech industry and feeling the bias of not being technical.
It had a few unique takes in it, but definitely a lot of jealousy and resentment in the writing.
It’s ok.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Tom
- 03-21-20
a worm's-eye account of the latest tech bubble
Anytime unlimited amounts of money start flowing interesting stories will follow. Anna Wiener had an insider's vantage on the tech bubble of the mid-teens but as someone from a publishing and liberal arts, instead of a coding and business, background, brought an outsider's objectivity to this money orgy. Wiener is an excellent writer who has a lovely way with the last word in a sentence--using it to modify her observations with well-timed irony but never predictably nor with a heavy hand. I'm less enamored with what she hopes are fresh observations about the excesses and blind spots of the tech world: that it's a boys' club, that it enables workplace harassment, that all the money has made San Francisco less livable. Nothing fresh here you couldn't get with equal humor on HBO's Silicon Valley. Thus, the memoir serves more to chart a naive young woman's gradual awakening to this unusual world than to expose what we already knew was happening there.
1 person found this helpful