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 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 ). With Amazonia , James Marcus adds to the ever-simmering stew of Amazon.com analysis a new, almost quaint perspective: that of an employee hired for his expertise in literature. Marcus traces the company's familiar climb, plummet, and re-ascent, but this time we witness the pyrotechnics from the book-strewn hallways of the editorial department. After an abbreviated heydey, editorial talent lost cachet at the burgeoning Internet behemoth, replaced by metrics worship and automated innovations like "truncating widgets." Despite the demoralizing shift, Marcus makes evident the loyalty editors continued to display, a "quasi-religious devotion… almost impossible to explain to outsiders." The concept of making history was just too intoxicating for most to abandon (as were the stock options). Marcus's writing has enough genuine humor and self-deprecation to squelch any accusations of "optimizing for optics," or worse, whining. Aside from a few sections that feel somewhat adrift (oblique mentions of an imploding marriage and an extended Emerson sidebar) the prose is driving and the voice engaging and remarkably fair. For anyone who worked at Amazon.com in the early days, reading Amazonia is akin to leafing through a high school yearbook (I was an Amazon editor from 1997-2002). Nostalgia is inescapable--even for the irritations of the time, like All Hands Meetings (pep rallies) and the exaltation of MBAs (the popular kids). The thing about yearbooks, though, is that we're really only interested in our own. Whether outsiders will be as captivated by this surf down virtual memory lane is questionable. For alums, it's a lasting keepsake. --Brangien Davis *Starred Review* Marcus, an accomplished writer of magazine articles and five books, was hired in 1996 as a senior editor at Amazon.com, which was just being recognized as the first Internet bookstore. The company hadn't even gone public yet, and no one had any idea that Amazon would become the poster child for the Internet stock frenzy, but the excitement was already palpable among the young, casually dressed workforce. Marcus began by cranking out thousands of online book reviews, and before long he was doing online author interviews and managing the content of the home page. He spent five years at the company, during which time his stock options made him a paper millionaire, only to watch in anguish as most of it evaporated before his eyes. Marcus tells his story with wit and candor, revealing what it was really like to live in the New Paradigm, where you "monetized eyeballs" and "leveraged your verbiage" to reach an "inflection point" (make money). Although the company survived both the NASDAQ crash and 9/11, the journey was not without loss of artistic freedom: the home page, no longer shaped by human talent, is now simply programmed to display content based on the user's buying habits. David Siegfried Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "As fine a guide to the late 1990s world of Pioneer Square and Pike Street as we are likely to see." ― The Weekly Standard "Funny, contemplative . . . a memoir that generates frequent smiles of recognition." ― San Francisco Chronicle "The most entertaining memoir I've read this year." ―Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer "Marcus is a graceful writer with an eye for detail." ― The Boston Globe "Should win over even the most jaded dot-com vets with [its] swift, clever, and intelligent rendering of their history." ― Seattle Weekly James Marcus was employed as Senior Editor at Amazon from 1996 to 2001. The executive editor of Harper's and 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. Nearly a decade after it opened business in a California garage,