Only one new book debuted on the Wall Street Journal business best-selling list, published on July 16-17, p. C10.

The book is entitled Chaos Monkeys:  Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez (New York:  Harper, 2016).  The book was distributed on June 28, 2016, and debuted at # 5 in the list, which is incredibly high.  It has also been on the New York Times best-seller list, thus qualifying the book as a potential selection at our First Friday Book Synopsis in Dallas.

One description of the book is “Liar’s Poker meets The Social Network in an irreverent exposé of life inside the tech bubble.”

Here is a summary of the book, from Amazon.com:

“After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team, turning its users’ data into profit for COO Sheryl Sandberg and chairman and CEO Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually landed at rival Twitter. He also fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, committed lewd acts and brewed illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding Zuckerberg’s desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sport cars on the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an overpaid Silicon Valley wastrel.

“Now, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. The question is, will we survive?”

I haven’t read this book yet, and I don’t know if we will present it at the First Friday Book Synopsis.  But, I’ve been doing  this long enough to know that people love to buy books that are exposes. Also, books about scandals sell very well.  Perhaps that is how this book vaulted all the way to # 5 in its debut on the best-selling list.