The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick

(Simon & Schuster, 372 pages, $26)

David Kirkpatrick’s authoritative new history of Facebook “could not be better timed,” said David Gelles in the Financial Times. A year after a sensationalistic best-seller propagated a sordid version of the brief history of the wildly popular social-networking site, fans and critics alike still have only “a sketchy understanding of Facebook’s DNA.” Everyone knows that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg created the company from his Harvard dorm room, just six years ago. But what drives the 26-year-old? Kirkpatrick was encouraged by Zuckerberg to write this book, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he attributes Facebook’s every move and misstep to youth and youthful idealism. But his warts-and-all account rings true.

You don’t have to be one of Facebook’s 500 million users for your life to be affected by Zuckerberg, said Rich Jaroslovsky in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Because the site now holds a peerless stash of information that advertisers would love to tap into, this hoodie-wearing geek can help create norms that will affect the entire Internet. So it’s important to know he has both a missionary’s zeal about the power of social networking and a “blind spot” about users’ privacy. Zuckerberg claims to care about helping people protect sensitive information, but he’s part of a generation for whom the very concept of privacy “seems as quaint as a rotary phone.”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Zuckerberg even overshares about his own career, said Paul Boutin in The Wall Street Journal. Some anecdotes make you wonder how Facebook’s sometimes prickly founder “still has a job.” Zuckerberg used to carry business cards that read “I’m CEO … bitch.” Once, to embarrass a venture capital firm he didn’t like, he showed up at a meeting in pajama pants. Even in that getup, he’s not someone you can imagine slacking off. Judging from this book, “Facebook users who think that they are addicted to the site don’t have anything on Mark Zuckerberg.”