(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.”
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