I grew frustrated, when reading about the long hours and bellicose meetings, with the dearth of explanation of why so many people (seemed to) put up with it. That portrayal doesn't do Amazon many favors in the hiring market. Over more than 300 pages, Amazon is painted as a brutally competitive workplace, with long hours and devoid of any "techie" playfulness. (Few tech companies are more fortified in silence than Amazon.) Otherwise, Stone leans on past interviews with the CEO and interviews that the company did grant him. But to any reader yearning for the chronology - we'll get to that word choice in a bit - of a company second only to Google in its command of the Internet and unchallenged in its command of Internet commerce, this book is well worth reading.Īlready Amazon has issued a statement condemning "The Everything Store" as one-sided - ironic considering Bezos, according to Stone, declined to give him more than an hour of his time for the book. None of the drama puts you on the edge of your seat - we generally know how things turn out. There are the expected archetypes: entrepreneurs in garages, backstabbings and skin-of-the-teeth deals.
But through hundreds of interviews and years of covering the company as a journalist, Stone - a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco - does a pretty good job capturing Amazon's meteoric rise. Biographers (and book reviewers) are always doomed to oversimplify their subject. "How do you plan to handle the narrative fallacy?" Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon, asks Brad Stone at the start of his book, "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon." The moment is both an homage to Bezos' intelligence and an acknowledgment that this book, no matter how detailed, will over-distill the sprawling digital marketplace and mysterious chief executive.īezos is, of course, correct. By Brad Stone (Little, Brown 372 pages $28)
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