Andrew Leonard in Salon: "Amazonia is an exquisitely written literary delight... Marcus takes a story that most of us already know--the giddy euphoria of the late '90s stock market--and turns it into a riveting, personal document. He convinces us that he does not and did not really care about the money; instead, he cared about the books. And to have someone who loves books write a book about Amazon, 'the world's largest bookstore,' is a real treat." (Click here to read the complete review.)

Carlin Romano in The Philadelphia Inquirer: "The author refers to irony as 'the Eastener's oxygen,' and Amazonia always feels highly oxygenated. But just as there's tough love, there's gentle oxygen. Amazonia combines trenchant travel literature through Bezos country with winning autobiographical reminiscence by an incisive critic. Philosophically, Marcus extracts the proper lesson: Business is ultimately about business, and literature is about literature. What a pleasure, though, to hear what happened when the two crossed paths in cyberspace. Amazonia is the most entertaining memoir I've read this year." (Click here to read the complete review.)

Thomas Mallon in The Weekly Standard: "I can't say I've ever seen a truly good dot-com novel, but I no longer feel deprived. With Amazonia, James Marcus has written the sort of book I was imagining--even if it has, as Henry Kissinger might say, 'the added advantage of being true.'... The book has a lightly worn erudition and a witty line-by-line texture, and while Marcus functions just fine as the picaresque hero of this nonfiction novel, genially suffering thorugh the company picnic and downtown-shaking earthquake, he never forces himself to be a 'character' in any literary or hey-look-at-me way. He's likely to remain the single best historian of Amazon's ethos, if not its spreadsheet." (Click here to read the complete review.)

Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post Book World: "A smart, funny memoir of the five years James Marcus spent writing in-house books reviews for Amazon, and otherwise (at Amazon, 'otherwise' covers a lot of ground) toiling in Bezos's vineyards. His is not a story from which any large morals can be drawn--expect, perhaps, the moral first postulated by Fats Waller: One never knows, do one?--but it is an amusing inside glimpse at what is surely one of the world's strangest businesses." (Click here to read the complete review.)

Stefan Stern in The Financial Times: "One of the first really good books to be written about the dot-com boom... It is [the author's] blend of self-deprecating insight and authoritative comment that lifts the book out of the ordinary. The contrast with some of the more foolish examples of journalism and blockbuster titles, published at the height of the boom, could not be more pronounced... And his literary skills, and sense of humour, were left intact, as this beautifully written book confirms. "

David Kipen in The San Francisco Chronicle: "One of the few firsthand accounts of the whole high-tech tilt-a-whirl by someone who didn't need a ghostwriter." (Click here to read the complete review.)

Rachel Holmes in The Times (London): "Amazonia elegantly captures the exciting freefall of [the dot-com] experience. He shows how Amazonians managed to reconcile a willing suspension of disbelief with sleeplessness, breathing the intoxicating air of what felt, however self-delusionally, like making history... A modern-day fable of humanist man against machine. Marcus leaves the reader to decide whether he wins or loses."