Careless People

Sarah Wynn-Williams was a New Zealand diplomat who believed Facebook could do real good in the world, so she talked her way into the company and rose to lead its global public policy work. Her account of those years is the view from the room where decisions were made: private jets, summits with heads of state, and the leaders at the top, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg among them, as she saw them up close. The title borrows Fitzgerald's phrase from The Great Gatsby, and the reason becomes clear.

It is a bestselling memoir, darkly funny as often as it is shocking, written by someone who was inside long enough to understand how idealism curdles. For anyone who uses social media and has ever wondered who is really steering it, this is sobering and hard to put down.