This was alright but not too super interesting as it somewhat relies on public news details to explore post-2010 Amazon. Has some behind-the-scenes details about various Amazon endeavors but not too inside detail stuff really, he suggests Amazon intially gave him quite a bit of access and cooperation but then cut him off at some point possibly because of the pandemic making things more difficult rather than anything deliberate to harm the book. One exception would be Bezos, who refused to respond and whose ex-wife wrote an infamous one-star Amazon review of the guys previous book on the first half of the Amazon story, The Everything Store, but he also suggests that this may have just been too late in his asking and also due to the pandemic. Bezos is a weird guy but gets a lot of things right and generally (but not always) admits his failures, a sort of anti-Immelt to compare to another recent book I read. The author starts to paint a picture of Bezos changing in his personal life having an effect on Amazon itself but mostly abandons this and doesn't really get too into it other than noting how Bezos put some of his focus on other stuff like Blue Origin or The Washington Post allowing other people to run stuff at Amazon culminating in Bezos stepping down as CEO to become just Chairman last year. Most detailed part of the book was on the development of Alexa, I was hoping he'd get more into AWS and while he notes its success and importance to the company he mostly ignores anything the company did regarding it other than trying to get a Department of Defense contract it lost to Microsoft, possibly because of Trump's hatred of Bezos, and I wonder if he might not have had the technical chops to ask the company about it being a filthy journalist and the way he uses the "cloud" in his writing as if it's some kind of technomagic.
I liked this but also didn't like parts of this. It's a decent companion to an earlier book I posted, that one analyzed things from the establishment side (i.e. John Boehner, etc.), this one is more the outsiders (Palin or Trump types) and risers who took advantage. The writer is a NYT journalist and MSNBC commentator and I think he's writing for that audience, he says a lot of weird things that seem in that vein of trying not to upset them. He also does that tic I hate, especially in historical works, where he calls random things "historic" or "unprecedented" or says someone is "coming close to crossing the line" or whatever, then goes on to use examples about how actually this stuff is totally normal and goes on all the time. So you get the standard stuff like saying Trump CHANGED EVERYTHING before noting how Pat Buchanan did all the same exact stuff decades earlier and how even MAGA was stolen from Reagan. Then you get even stranger stuff like saying "Newt Gingrich leaned into the dangerous new era with his rhetoric during his presidential campaign" and it's like dude Newt Gingrich built his entire career on red meat for the base and attacking the media! (He never gets around to this other than a hundred pages later mentioning that Gingrich had the House investigate Clinton a lot.) Or stuff like saying "unprecedented ugly attacks" on Obama while both mentioning how Hillary literally personally murdered Vince Foster and not mentioning how Adams said Jefferson was going to rape everyone into atheism. That's unfortunate because the story and presentation of it is otherwise fun even if it jumps around a bit weirdly, I especially like stuff like Trump (or Sarah Palin earlier on) saying random things nobody noticed in say 2011, but now a decade later are hilarious unintentional foreshadowing of history. (One example, Trump apparently tweeted on election night 2012 that "the machines" had stolen the election from Romney, while in the real world he was talking to Roger Stone somewhat accusing Stone of having convinced Trump to "back that loser" when Stone wanted Trump to run against Romney. Also, there's language from a Romney campaign memo about how they convinced Trump to endorse by telling him how big the media attention and crowd of reporters for it would be. Apparently Trump had been offering unsolicited advice to the campaign for some time about the importance of large crowds whenever Romney appeared on TV.) This is also the second book published this year that I've read in recent months that mentions the Trayvon Martin case as an example of something almost entirely unrelated other than how he was Black, gets the legal outcome wrong and then of all the things on the page doesn't have a citation for that. No need to cite obvious things after all.
My favorite story in this I had not seen before: So if you remember, Chris Christie was originally hired by Trump to lead the transition team. Not the worst possible decision in the world considering and Christie does what's normal and makes binders full of candidates for appointments. As is well known, nobody else from the Trump team ever looks at these or goes to any of the transition meetings. Anyway, the day after Trump wins, Steve Bannon realizes somebody should look at these and since he wanted to influence the picks he decides to head down to the room where they were stored in Trump Tower and take a look. So he starts leafing through one of them and realizes, shit, this is a lot of people. Trump will have to appoint thousands directly and at least tens of thousands more indirectly. Bannon decides, well, I don't need to know
everything just what interests me, and asks an aide how many people Trump will appoint to just the main national security team for example. He gets the answer and goes "Ninety?!? We don't know ninety people!" This is when Trump fires Christie and puts Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions in charge of it.
