Wiener was, and maybe still is, one of us; far from seeking to disabuse civic-minded techno-skeptics of our views, she is here to fill out our worst-case scenarios with shrewd insight and literary detail.

... a different sort of Silicon Valley narrative, a literary-minded outsider’s insider account of an insulated world that isn’t as insular or distinctive as it and we assume. Wiener is our guide to a realm whose denizens have been as in thrall to a dizzying sense of momentum as consumers have been.

Compared to the most sensational details on companies like WeWork or Theranos that have come out in recent years, there is nothing shocking or revelatory in Wiener’s account of startup life and culture. That’s also maybe the point. Rather than shocking and lurid details, recognition and familiarity play a key role in the experience of Uncanny Valley.

[Wiener] was seen as dispensable; her memoir is anything but. If Silicon Valley had seen her potential, she would not have become one of the finest, most assured writers about the internet today. I read it in one sitting, overcome with the eerie sensation that my own life was being explained to me.

For a twentysomething memoir, Uncanny Valley is remarkably chaste. Although there are hints of San Francisco’s legendary perversions, our otherwise curious narrator never dabbles.

Wiener shines when she turns her incisive observations on the many entitled men running amok in Silicon Valley.

Wiener’s book transcends the model of a tech-work memoir; ultimately, she’s chronicling her interior climate in opposition to quotidian surroundings that she finds essentially bizarre.

...the book’s first half unfolds like an exquisitely curated Tumblr blog, with a scroll of beautifully juxtaposed snapshots of the young, newly wealthy and utterly absurd.

...beautifully obsered.

... [a] compelling memoir-ethnography of Silicon Valley.

... extraordinary.

...biting and funny.

The entrenched sexism of Silicon Valley is one of several endemic ills that Anna Wiener examines at unsparingly close range in Uncanny Valley, her absorbing, unsettling, gimlet-eyed memoir of time served in tech.

The quality of Wiener’s on-the-ground observations, coupled with acuity she brings to understanding the psychology at work, makes the book illuminating on a page-by-page basis. It is as though Wiener found herself under a spell that separated her from herself, a temporary state she still finds a little baffling.

... almost the opposite of a tell-all. It withholds a lot — mostly the names of people and companies — and replaces them with generic formulations: 'an app for coupon-clipping,' 'a search-engine giant down in Mountain View.' It’s as if the book is trying to switch our brains back to factory settings.

... remarkable.

Wiener is a keen social observer and scene-setter. She has an eye for telling details about people and places, and is especially attuned to the hypocrisies of hubristic young men.

A stranger in a strange land, [Wiener] defamiliarizes the new norms of the tech industry unquestioningly swallowed by her peers, restoring friction to a milieu devoted to eliminating it.

... absorbing, fast-paced.

... lucid, bleak, and hypnotic.

Wiener’s account is not designed to shock in the way others have. It is instead intimate, the rolling thoughts of a young hipster sucked into this world against her better judgment.

... incisive.

Wiener focuses on the startup climate as a whole—giving an insider’s view of San Francisco and the tech-​Manifest-Destiny-minded brogrammers who inhabit it.

Wiener's perspective as an outsider's insider makes her sellout narrative feel fresh. She humanizes people who seem—to the cynical observer—to want to become drones, and she wrestles with her own slide into that lifestyle with the candor and philosophical complexity you'd expect from someone who has published in well-respected magazines. But that perspective also importantly allows her to see right through the intoxicating mists of tech optimism and describe the real power these young entrepreneurs used to wield and (though it's kind of changing now) still do. Suffice it to say that after 50 pages, you'll want to throw your computer and your phone and your Amazonian spyware out the window..

... terrific.

...written with the kind of piquant ambivalence that triggers a salivary response, followed by spitting cries of Didion’s umpteenth coming, in so many modern readers. Wiener is a rock-solid writer.

Wiener wants to do for the techy California of the 2010s what Joan Didion did for the hippy California of the 1960s. She wants to clasp the soul of the age. I liked the book a lot and raced through it, but Wiener is no Didion.

Every now and again a book comes along that sends a rumble through the tech industry and everything it stands for.

Two aspects of Anna Wiener’s memoir, Uncanny Valley immediately make themselves apparent: its understated observations and attention to detail.

...a neat time lapse of the past seven years in Silicon Valley.

References to 'meritocracy' among those at companies dominated by white American men would seem knowingly ironic were so many of the characters in Uncanny Valley not completely lacking in self-awareness.

These corporations are so omnipresent that they can remain nameless; this is not a wink to the informed reader, but a writer highlighting how embedded contemporary life is in her subject.

A compelling takedown of the pitfalls of start-up culture, from sexism to the lack of guardrails, Uncanny Valley highlights the maniacal optimism of the twentysomethings behind the screens and the pitfalls of the culture they are building..

Equal parts bildungsroman and insider report, this book reveals not just excesses of the tech-startup landscape, but also the Faustian bargains and hidden political agendas embedded in the so-called 'inspiration culture' underlying a too-powerful industry.

Technology journalist Wiener looks at Silicon Valley life in this insider-y debut memoir that sharply critiques start-up culture and the tech industry.