Amazonia purports to tell the story of five years in the
life of Amazon.com – a biography of the company from 1996 to 2001, if you
will. Those were the years that James
Marcus spent as employee number 55 during the dot-com boom. It’s also,
partially and not very successfully, the tale of Marcus’ relationship with the
company.
Problem is, Amazon as a company is the brainchild of Jeff
Bezos. More than that – Amazon is Bezos and Bezos is Amazon, one of the only
people to ride out the .com boom and bust and still be captaining the ship
years later. Yet Marcus is able to throw very little light on the man behind the
company. His impressions are limited to his initial interview and the
occasional appearance at a company picnic or event. Without that insight into
its driving force, his sketch of the company becomes little more than a narrative
of its office politics, in which Marcus depicts himself as a guileless victim
of others’ manoeuvrings.
The personal workplace narrative can work, as a genre – just
look at The Devil Wears Prada. Unfortunately,
Marcus seems to have a somewhat ambiguous relationship with his former
employer. He’s not sure how he feels about the company that solved all his
financial problems, but also made him question his role as a journalist. He
dwells on these questions rather a lot. This may have been a better, or at
least more entertaining book if he’d decided Bezos was the devil and decided to
stick the boot in. Instead he seems to be hobbled by his journalistic ethics
and attempts to be fair to all the people he portrays. The result reminds me
why I usually prefer to read fiction.
If you’re looking for insight into how the .com boom came to
pass or why it failed, don’t look here. If you are interested in how Bezos
created a company from scratch that went on to dominate online retailing, there
is little to learn from Amazonia. The
only reason to read it is to try and understand what it was like, on a personal
level, to be part of a crazy time when the world seemed to go mad. Marcus still
seems puzzled by the whole episode today and most probably, readers will be
left feeling the same way.
Ambiguous relationships are what life is about, in fiction and nonfiction alike. That's how it is for me, anyway, hence Amazonia. If you were expecting a biography of Jeff Bezos, you came to the wrong place, but I'm glad you read the book in any case.
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