UNCANNY VALLEY.

• Author: Wolfe, Liz

In 2013, Anna Wiener quit her coffee-fetching job in publishing to work in Silicon Valley. Seven years later, that choice brings us another entry in the glut of books about tech-world malfeasance.

Wiener's memoir, Uncanny Valley, dips into gender studies ("my job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego") and touches on founders' self-centeredness ("baby tyrants ... one-hit wonders who had dropped out of school and become their own bosses and thought they knew how the world worked").

But Wiener was too junior to have a full view of the world about which she purports to offer a sweeping indictment. She worked in relatively low-level customer support roles with little prior experience yet got a hefty payday at the end, cashing out stock options for $200,000. She made out fine and couldn't see the whole map, but she doesn't let that stand in the way of her conclusion that Silicon Valley's...