“The Social Network”, last year’s film about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the legal battles over the popular website, has been nominated for 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (David Fincher), Best Actor (Jesse Eisenberg) and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The screenplay for the film is based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, “a compulsively readable story of innocence lost–and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another” (Publishers Weekly).

For more on the history of the Facebook phenomenon and the rise of social networking, see The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick, available at CA Library.

According to Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, “Kirkpatrick was granted extensive access to Zuckerberg and his associates, and their cooperation resulted in a mostly sympathetic account of the company, though Kirkpatrick does not shy away from dissecting its missteps and successive disputes over privacy. He gives the reader a detailed understanding of how the company grew from a 2004 Harvard dorm-room project into the world’s second-most-visited site after Google.” Read the full New York Times review and an excerpt from the book here.

For a complete list of this year’s Academy Award nominees, visit the Oscar website here.