'Revolution 2.0' by Wael Ghonim

REVOLUTION 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power, by Wael Ghonim. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 308 pp., $26.

Last February, viewers of Egypt's Dream TV network were stunned to see a young man weep in the middle of an interview and walk off the set. Fresh out of captivity, he was only just discovering the names and faces of those who had died in anti-government protests.

He was Wael Ghonim, Google's head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa. Through nimble use of social media, Ghonim had helped unleash a wave of protests that would end the three-decade presidency of Hosni Mubarak. In "Revolution 2.0," his new memoir, the 31-year-old agitator recalls that Web-generated mutiny.

Ghonim has his critics, who say he dropped the cause. Yet his role in igniting revolt is beyond dispute. A joke about it cropped up last year: Mubarak dies and runs into his predecessors -- Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated, and Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had heart failure. They ask him how he was killed. "Facebook," Mubarak says.

Ghonim was born into Egypt's secular middle class. In 1998, he founded a YouTube of sorts: IslamWay, a forum for sharing audiotaped religious content. Heading to the United States in 2001 to donate the site to a Muslim charity, he met and married an American convert, and moved back after Sept. 11. Seven years later, he joined Google.

In 2010, he set up a Facebook support page for Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, who had just returned to Egypt. ElBaradei taught him one thing: "We did not need a savior; we had to do this ourselves," he writes. Then on June 8, 2010, Ghonim saw a photo of the disfigured Khaled Said -- a young man who had been dragged out of an Alexandria Internet cafe and fatally beaten. Justice for Said became his primary cause.

Ghonim set up a Facebook page called "We Are All Khaled Said" -- constantly changing Internet proxies to stay nameless -- and scheduled a peaceful protest in Alexandria where people in black held hands and faced the sea. The protest eventually snowballed into a Jan. 25 rally. By Feb. 11, Mubarak was gone.

Ghonim spent 12 of those heady days blindfolded in a cell, arrested on suspicion of espionage after dining with two American colleagues from Google. While in detention, he was unmasked as the Facebook webmaster -- and miraculously freed. The tide had turned, and he had helped turn it.

"Revolution 2.0" contains few personal anecdotes. Ghonim seems more at ease in virtual reality -- "a real-life introvert yet an Internet extrovert," he says. Climactic moments are evoked by reproducing his Facebook rallying cries, which, ex post facto, lack fizzle, and which end with a tally of Facebook "likes" and "comments."

Web pages and mouse clicks don't add up to a rousing revolutionary narrative. Yet in the real world, Ghonim's low-key style proved more effective than guerrilla warfare. There's no doubting that his tell-it-like-it-is memoir will be studied by historians for generations to come.