Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut
By James Marcus (New Press, $24.95)
TIM BOYLE / NEWSMAKERS
No Bezos bashing.
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It's quite an accomplishment to pull off a truly engaging, amusing dot-com memoir— particularly when the memoir centers as much on the ups and downs of the Dow as the implications of surrendering one's soul to Amazon.com's advertorial mini reviews and its "culture of metrics." Mark the accomplishment even more pronounced when the book comes out alongside a slew of other tech-world tell-alls, and just two years after a fairly successful inside-Amazon account—and all this not even 10 years past the initial fervor of the Internet gold rush. Amazon employee No. 55 James Marcus has done all of this, and a little more, with Amazonia. Where Mike Daisey's less serious and more slapsticky 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com—first a one-man show, then a book, then an off-Broadway show—focused on his weirdo-techie colleagues and slacker culture, Amazonia manages to be just as entertaining while probing middle management, stock splits, and bizarre business strategies. Then, improbably, Marcus makes sense of it all with heavy doses of Emersonian philosophy.
But Marcus doesn't just bat around erudite parallels between the Panic of 1837 and the dot-com demise; he dishes plenty on other early Amazon colleagues, two of whom—Nicholas H. Allison and Tim Appelo— have current SW bylines. Unlike Daisey, however, he's not out to settle scores or make other Amazonians—including founder Jeff Bezos—look stupid or petty. It's the author's balanced and restrained personalization of the company, and his honesty about his own foibles, that make his economic analysis so palatable. The numbers are offset by the characters, and vice versa. As senior editor of the literature pages at Amazon, Marcus describes clandestinely pushing titles and authors not of the ultrapopular Oprah Book Club ilk—and you can't help but root him on for it. Yes, he was as seduced as anyone by the lure of the eventual cash-out, but as his family and crappy Honda are falling apart during his 1996–2001 Amazon tenure, Marcus renders himself more as middle-class observer than desperate money grabber. (But in the end, Marcus does just fine, too—even though he didn't vest until after the Nasdaq crash.)
What remains to be seen is how Amazonia will go over in these parts. (Marcus, like Daisey, has since relocated back to New York.) Since we all know at least one poor sucker who spent a Christmas stint packing books in Amazon's infamous old SoDo warehouse, this boom-and-bust story might seem old hat. Fortunately, Marcus is a wonderful writer who should win over even the most jaded dot-com vets with his swift, clever, and intelligent rendering of their history. That Marcus has freed himself from Amazon's crypto-corrupt blend of marketing and reviewing books to finally write one of his own is a benefit to readers everywhere—whether they buy it from his ex-employer or not. LAURA CASSIDY
James Marcus will appear at Elliott Bay Book Co., 7:30 p.m. Mon., June 28.
Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me
By Craig Seligman (Counterpoint, $23)
Craig Seligman's double-barreled intellectual bio of his idolized pal Pauline Kael and the more icily remote Susan Sontag is as outrageously unreasonable as its subjects, and almost as inspiring.
It would make way more sense to pair Kael as an "opposite" with her auteurist nemesis, film critic Andrew Sarris, and Seligman does cover that infamous smackdown (slanting it in Kael's favor). But he focuses instead on Kael and Sontag, who aren't opposites—they're just strikingly different, with ironic parallels. Both were secular Jewish single moms from the West who directed their philosophy-department-trained intellects toward pop culture. Both conquered the East as cultural critics whose essays took no prisoners, suffered no fools, and imperiously proclaimed the last word on any subject at hand.
And they went such separate ways that only Seligman's immense cleverness manages to corral them into the same delightfully digressive essay. Sontag sprang to rock-star fame in youth as a high-culture expert on pop culture, then went through more morphs than Madonna: postmod novelist; experimental filmmaker; redefiner of photography, fascism, and illness as metaphor; and, finally, astoundingly, best-selling intellectual romance novelist. Kael discovered film criticism by marrying a theater owner in her 30s, and scarcely made a dime nor a dent until Mr. Shawn made her filmdom's diva at The New Yorker in her mid-40s.
Seligman's meticulous, perverse comparison of Kael and Sontag is exhilaratingly illuminating. Nobody ever nailed Sontag's style better: "As colorless, as odorless, and as intoxicating as vodka." He freely confesses he's ass-over-teakettle in love with Kael's brassy, faux-demotic sensibility, and aghast at Sontag's dour, abstract puritanism: "Next to Kael's catholicity, Sontag's high-mindedness— her horror of the vulgar and the low—makes her look thin-skinned and finicky, a kind of modernist Margaret Dumont." He prefers Kael's wicked, vulgar glee (and also once worked for her at The New Yorker).
Like a crusading nerd attorney, Seligman defends Kael against all accusers. He makes short work of Renata Adler's ridiculous ax murder of Kael's reputation in The New York Review and niftily acquits her of Alfred Kazin's and Leon Wieseltier's charges of anti-Semitism.
