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Synopsis
The entertaining story of the first five years of Amazon.com, recounted by employee number 55.
"Americans with an eye cocked toward the markets were asked to believe that Amazon, a two-year-old bookseller, was worth more than the combined values of Sears and US Steel."—from Amazonia
James Marcus was hired as a senior editor at Amazon.com in 1996, giving him a ringside seat for the company's explosive rise and dismal wallet-busting swoon. Now—as the e-commerce giant makes an astonishing comeback—he tells all. Unlike the recent crop of dot.com memoirs, this is no tale of a bankrupt and brokenhearted entrepreneur. Marcus came aboard as a self-described "token humanist," and his take on the new economy juggernaut is predominantly a cultural one. Why, he asks, did Jeff Bezos's brainchild become the key symbol of Internet euphoria? How did the company change as it morphed from a miniscule start-up to a global, multibillion-dollar leviathan? Was the Web breaking more promises than it kept? And finally: What could an editor do to resist being transformed into a hyperventilating shill?
In answering these questions, Marcus takes us to meetings, job interviews, trade shows, and corporate retreats. We spend a freezing holiday season at the warehouse, and a considerably warmer afternoon at the company's summer picnic—where Bezos himself mans the dunk tank. Amazonia is a work of rare wit and razor-sharp observation, and a superlative guide to America's lost world of the nineties.
Author Biography: From 1996 to 2001 James Marcus was employed as Senior Editor at Amazon.com. His journalism has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Village Voice, the New York Times Book Review, the Nation, Newsday, the Washington Post Book World, Salon, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.
The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley
Now James Marcus adds to the pile, with this smart, funny memoir of the five years he spent writing in-house book reviews for Amazon, and otherwise (at Amazon, "otherwise" covers a lot of ground) toiling in Bezos's vineyards. His is not a story from which any large morals can be drawn -- except, perhaps, the moral first postulated by Fats Waller: One never knows, do one? -- but it is an amusing inside glimpse at what is surely one of the world's strangest businesses.