Book of the week: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

(Little, Brown, $28)

Jeff Bezos “clearly isn’t a joy to work for,” said Bethany McLean in The Washington Post. The 49-year-old founder and CEO of Amazon explicitly encourages contentiousness at the Seattle-based online retailer and technology firm, and he has long thought nothing of hurling insults at subordinates. The “astonishingly high” turnover rate among Amazon executives can probably be partially explained by Bezos’s penchant for firebombing meetings with one-liners like “Why are you ruining my life?” But don’t expect author Brad Stone to give America’s 12th-richest man a hard time about such behavior, said Jay Greene in The Seattle Times. Though the veteran Bloomberg Businessweek reporter rolls out plenty of unflattering anecdotes in this “deftly written” work, he “seems to accept that the harsh tactics were a prerequisite for creating one of the dominant Web giants of the era.”

Combativeness is only part of the Amazon story, anyway, said Matthew Yglesias in Slate.com. Bezos’s true gift has been his ability to look past quarterly earnings reports as he focused on giving customers the lowest prices and most seamless service. While Stone undersells that point, his “consistently engaging” account makes clear why Amazon succeeded. Yes, Bezos seems to have grasped the immense potential of online retailing as early as 1994, when he quit a hedge-fund post at age 30 to launch an online bookseller. But “the best part of the book is set during the early- to mid-aughts,” after the bursting of the dot-com bubble sent Amazon’s share prices plummeting. Bezos kept Amazon afloat by improvising—taking on the online operations of various big-box stores. At the time, Amazon was neither a startup nor a corporate powerhouse, and Stone’s anecdotes about the period “nicely illustrate the combination of hard work, intelligence, and old-fashioned dumb luck it takes to succeed in business.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But Bezos’s success “invites a huge question, one that is not sufficiently addressed in The Everything Store,” said Andrew Leonard in Salon.com. “What is the long-term impact of Amazon on us?” The company’s relentless focus on price and convenience has been a boon for customers, but not necessarily for workers, the publishing industry, or states that depend on retail taxes. Even though it might be too early for anyone to sum up how Amazon has and will change society, “I’d like a book called The Everything Store to push a little harder on posing the question.”