Amazonia

Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut

James Marcus

paperback

$15.95


NOW IN PAPERBACK Employee #55’s story of the first five years of Amazon.com, which “brims with fascinating Amazoniana” (The Los Angeles Times)
This book is far more important than just somebody’s experience at Amazon. Amazonia really does convey the experience of the era.
—HENRY BLODGET, FORMER WALL STREET ANALYST WHO COVERED AMAZON.COM IN THE LATE 1990s

In a book that Ian Frazier has called, “a fascinating and sometimes hair-raising morality tale from deep inside the Internet boom,” James Marcus, hired by Amazon.com in 1996, when the company was so small his e-mail address could be james@amazon.com, looks back a decade later at the ecstatic rise, dramatic fall, and remarkable comeback of the consummate symbol of late 1990s America.

Observing “how it was to be in the right place (Seattle) at the right time (the 90s)” (Chicago Reader), Marcus offers a ringside seat on everything from his first interview with Jeff Bezos to the company’s bizarre, Nordic-style retreats, creating what Jonathan Raban calls “an utterly beguiling book.”  For this first paperback edition, Marcus has added a new afterword with further reflections on his Amazon experience. 

In the tradition of the most noteworthy and entertaining memoirs of recent years, Marcus offers us a modern-day fable, “a clear-eyed, first-person account, rife with digressions on the larger cultural meaning throughout” (Henry Alford, Newsday).


James Marcus was employed as Senior Editor at Amazon.com from 1996 to 2001. An award-winning translator, he has written for the Atlantic Monthly, the Village Voice, the New York Times Book Review,  the Washington Post Book World, the New York Review of Books, Lingua Franca, and many other publications. He lives in New York City.

Memoir / Business
Fall 2005
paperback
5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 288 pages
978-1-59558-024-5

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