Responding to MacKenzie Bezos's One-Star Slapdown

One of the gratifying and terrifying things about writing a book in 2013 is that anyone can immediately publish their review of it. Yesterday, a reader of my book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, did just that. The review was well written, entertaining, and perceptive about the challenges of doing a biography of a person and a company without their complete co-operation. In the end, the writer was the first to give the book one star. Negative feedback happens all the time. (Ask my editors.) The only reason this review is worth mentioning is that it was written by MacKenzie Bezos, Jeff Bezos’s wife.

Bezos said that he married MacKenzie after searching for someone resourceful enough to break him out of a Third World prison. By that standard, I got off easy. Mrs. Bezos mostly took me to task for what she perceived were subtle biases in my story. I’ll own up to that, though my slant is hardly political or personal. Nor is it particularly unique.