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Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
A workplace memoir charting a loss of idealism at Facebook, from the optimism of its role in the Arab Spring to when it was largely responsible for Trump’s first electoral victory, with horrifying stops along the way for their in the Rohingya genocide and collusion with the Chinese government to spy on, and censor, its citizens.
Author Wynn-Williams joined Facebook as their first real director of global public policy; a New Zealand born lawyer and diplomat, her naiveté and optimism is easy to laugh at now, for those that don’t remember the initial euphoria widely shared that the internet, and social platforms, could change the world for the better. A now sadly predictable account follows of a toxic workplace rife with sexual harassment, racism, nepotism, hypocrisy and above else, respect for the bottom line above all else.
Wynn-Williams convincingly makes the point that FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg could have gone in a different direction – towards good – and still been one of the richest men in the world, but simply didn’t bother, obsessed instead with his own vanity projects and sudden whims. Sandberg doesn’t come off much better; as many suspected from when Lean In was first published, it’s easier to do so when you’re already obscenely wealthy and have a staff to take care of your children and various homes, and that it’s one thing to speak truth to power when you are the power than it is as an employee desperate to hold onto your health insurance and mortgage.
The most notable thing about this book may be how readable it is. So much of the content is horrifying (if unsurprising) and yet it’s a fun, fast read that would be as well suited to a five hour plane ride as a new Michael Connelly or Emily Henry book. The author starts things off with being attacked by a shark while on a family camping trip, and I continued turning pages in a blur straight through to the end. Unless you’re a CEO or a COO yourself, this a fast read with wide appeal.
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Fever Beach: A Novel by Carl Hiaasen
Sometimes called the inventor of “Florida Guy Noir,” Hiaasen’s novels are something like margaritas, Jimmy Buffett music, a conch sandwich and flip flops in laugh-out-loud print. The fact that he wasn’t tarred and feathered years ago, in the predominantly Republican-leaning state he has always called home, would seem to indicate humour works like some sort of invisibility cloak, or that bipartisanship is not dead (at least when it comes to novels).
Fever Beach is more of what we’ve come to expect from Hiaasen, which is to say a zany sun soaked caper that skewers racists, corrupt politicians, the willfully ignorant and those who would pave paradise to put up a parking lot. He isn’t breaking any new ground here, but given current political events in the US, this is exactly the sort of lampooning satire required to laugh instead of rage against the news cycle for a change.
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An argument by the MSNBC host and author that the most precious resource in the world today are not diamonds, oil or gold, but our attention.
I’ll admit that when I included this in an LBI Bestseller list, I was simply going through the motions: noted, well reviewed author? Check? 100k print run? Check. Big 5 publisher with a marketing budget to promote this? Check. But it never occurred to me that I’d actually want to read it myself, assuming it was just another “cellphones, Facebook, Tik Tok bad” sort of screed.
But then I heard the author on CBC... background noise turned into something I stopped to pay attention to, and later became a hold at my local library. And I’m glad I did, because even though a lot of this is familiar, Hayes has crafted an extremely interesting, readable book that easily held my attention for the two sittings it took to devour it. Now it has me reevaluating where I put my attention, not only how, but for how long.
This would be a great Non-Fiction book club pick – I can’t stress enough how enjoyable this was to read, despite the distressing subject matter.
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Something like a cross between Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Educated and Glass Houses, a rock and roll memoir as much fairy tale as it is a coming of age story.
While I’m a fan of Case’s music, this is one of those memoirs where it doesn’t matter if you’d recognize any of her work at all. Case grew up hardscrabble in the Pacific Northwest with a dysfunctional family (to put it mildly). She could easily have ended up living in a double wide for the rest of her days, at best, but punk, music, horses and to a not insignificant degree Canada saved her.
I love and very much agree with the following from George Yatchisin in the California Review of Books: “somehow by the book’s end Case gets well past just the me in memoir, instead underlining the our in it. It’s a kind of prayer, kin to communion. Like everyone in a bar together huddled inside the sound of one song.”
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