BOOKS - TALES : POLITICAL DATA HARVESTER

1. MIND - Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America. By Christopher Wylie.

2. TARGETED : The Cambridge Analytica Whistle-Blower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump and Facebook Broke Democracy and How it can Happen Again. By Brittany kaiser.

The voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica, which filed for insolvency last year, looked like the stuff of liberal nightmares. Enumerating its salient features was like playing a game of cartoon-villain bingo.

There was the pretentious and slightly ridiculous name, redolent of a Bond-movie syndicate; the right wing billionaire Robert Mercer and his family, along with deep ties to Stephen K Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist; and there was chief executive, Alexander Nix, who was caught on    hidden camera bragging about the unsavory lengths the campaign would be willing to go to sway an election - a political gun for hire in a Savile Row suit.

The new memoirs by former Cambridge Analytica employees offer to illuminate the company's  shadiest dealings, though they differ wildly in both content and tone.

Christopher Wylie is the whistle-blower who first revealed how the company harvested data from millions of Facebook users without their permission; his book Mind------'' [the second part of the compound word is a vulgarity], is freewheeling and profane.

Brittany Kaiser came out as a whistle-blower, too, a week after Wylie did; her book ''Targeted'' is aggrieved and self-pitying.

After reading Wylie's memoirs, you'll have learned something; and after reading Kaiser's, you'll wonder whether she herself has learned much of anything at all.

Wylie's book recounts ''how a liberal, gay, 24 year old Candian found himself a part of a British military contractor developing psychological warfare tools for the America alt-right.''

That contractor was SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica's parent company; Wylie started working for the London-based SCL in 2013, before Bannon [''Steve from America''] arrived with an injection of Mercer's cash to create an American subsidiary for conservative causes.

Wylie, a former tech consultant for the Liberal Party in Canada who was pursuing a Ph.D in fashion-trend forecasting, initially believed his role at SCL would align with his values.

He explains how his interests in culture were a good fit for researching methods to de-radicalize insurgents in developing countries.

The honor and serving of the latest writings and operational research on Cambridge Analytica, continues. The World Students Society thanks book review author, Jennifer Szalai.