The reading group supplement provided by the publisher of Anna Wiener’s trenchant memoir, Uncanny Valley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) asks “What is it like for Wiener and other women working at mostly male tech companies? How do her employers respond when Wiener asks for higher pay and more equity? When she reports blatant sexual harassment?” Yep, good questions. What was it like: in many ways horrible. How do her employers respond? Badly. On the other hand, Wiener seems to acknowledge that complaining loudly while earning $1,, in her mid-2s, living in San Francisco, is a bit churlish. Wiener is a marvellous writer, sharp, hard-edged. She nails it. The men she describes are mostly awful, while often being perfectly pleasant, smart, witty. That, we realize, is the real danger. These men are slippery, frequently unaware of their circumlocution, as they weave tighter and tighter webs around their female employees, where the only escape is a full escape: get the hell out of the valley, Silicon Valley. One of the pleasures of the book is its quietly damning attacks on the mighty corporations that control the Valley, attacking by refusing to name them. Facebook is “a social network everyone said they hated but no one could stop logging in to,” its anonymous grinning founder, upon going public on the stock market, signing the “death knell for affordable rent in San Francisco.” Twitter is “a microblogging platform” that helps people “feel close to celebrities and other strangers they’d loathe in real life.” When her recent employer, “the open source startup” (GitHub), is purchased by the “highly litigious Seattle-based conglomerate” (Microsoft), for seven and a half billion dollars, she’s able to run for the hills with an extra two hundred thousand dollars in her bank account. “We were aware we had blind spots,” she writes. “They were still blind spots.” That, in a nutshell, was the problem, and still is.