Ben Mezrich, along with his clenched-teeth wife Tonya (see here), might be what passes for a celebrity in Boston, but Joe Nocera was having none of it in his Saturday New York Times column, headlined “Capturing The Facebook Obsession.”

Lede:

Ben Mezrich is the kind of nonfiction writer we used to call a hype artist. He takes relatively mundane subjects — counting cards in Vegas, derivatives trading, the New York Mercantile Exchange — and turns them into high-octane page-turners, replete with sex, skullduggery and plot twists worthy of James Patterson.

His protagonists — invariably young, testosterone-fueled men — are real, and he bases his books on true-life events, but he amps those events up to the point where the final product is an indistinguishable blend of fact and fiction. “In some instances,” he writes in a typical Ben Mezrich author’s note, “details of settings and descriptions have been changed or imagined.” The phrase “never let the facts get in the way of a good story” could have been coined to describe Mr. Mezrich’s approach.

To be fair, Nocera did call Mezrich’s Facebook book, The Accidental Billionaires, a “fun, zippy airport read.”

Even more pwned.