21 DOG YEARS: DOING TIME @ AMAZON.COM
Mike's first book adapts his solo show of the same name into a novel-length narrative, sketching the wild turns and ridiculous excesses of a ridiculous time. Part gonzo documentary and part personal memoir, Mike Daisey exposes a corporate world too absurd for the cartoons. Daisey, who labored for 21 dog years (almost three human ones) at Amazon.com, chronicles with lunatic precision his ascent from lowly temp to customer service rep to business development hustler--from the lightless cube farms where he rebelled by sending free books to Norwegians to the halls of BizDev, where the higher-ups insisted that the perfect business model was Pets.com, the company that showered all its assets on a sock puppet. Wickedly funny and alarmingly true, 21 Dog Years is an epic story of greed, self-deception, and heartbreak--an anthem to a bygone era of bounteous stock options and boundless insanity.
Read the first chapter of 21 Dog Years online here.
Praise for 21 Dog Years:
“Imagine a memoir by a grunt worker at the Ford Motor Company circa 1910, or from Monsanto circa 1950. Then imagine that memoirist as neurotic and very funny. Mike Daisey has done us a service by revealing the dorky, scary truth about Amazon.com before it’s too late.”
Neal Pollack, author ofThe Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature
“A modern Dickensian fable of pointless toil inside an industrial madhouse. Too funny not to be accurate, too heartbreaking not to be true.”
Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air
“A well-written, fast-paced piece of gonzo biography . . . elegiac and wry.”
Glenn Fleishman, Seattle Times
“Daisey’s raucous tales of a self-professed dilettante inside the Internet pressure cooker possess the ability to provoke horror and cosmic giggles, especially among those who reside outside dot-comland.”
John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“21 Dog Years has the wry sensibility of David Sedaris.”
Nick Wingfield, Wall Street Journal
“It's a love story.”
WIRED Magazine
“Daisey’s hilarious, heartbreaking, and surprisingly powerful recounting of life inside what may be the world’s strangest, most ephemeral company . . . One of the best books ever written about the Net.”
Jon Katz, author of Running to the Mountain and A Dog Year
“A brilliant, honest, and side-splitting account of the strangest company the world has ever seen. Mike Daisey is the tech world’s answer to Tom Green, Michael Moore, Spalding Gray, Jean Shepherd, and Mark Twain.”
Bill Lessard, author of Netslaves: True Tales of Working the Web
“For those still nursing a new economy hangover, Mike Daisey’s funny and evocative memoir serves up the hair of the dog that bit them.”
Andy Borowitz, New Yorker and New York Times humorist
“A superbly entertaining scroll through the capitalist, cyber dream world of the one Internet company absolutely everyone knows. . . . In the history of the Net, Daisey’s book will be a landmark.”
Roger Tagholm, Publishing News Review
“21 Dog Years is more than just one man’s adventures in Webland. It’s a farce, a confessional, and a love story; laugh-out-loud funny and surprisingly poignant.”
Robert Spector, author of Amazon.com: Get Big Fast
THE BEST OF TECHNOLOGY WRITING 2006
The Best of Technology Writing is an annual series that aims to increase public understanding and awareness of technological issues by collecting work that captures the versatility, excitement, and importance of this crucial field. Taking our cue from the open source movement, nominations for the 2006 volume were solicited through an online, open nominating process, then evaluated by a small group of judges, which included this year’s Guest Editor, Brendan I. Koerner. The result is a rich and extraordinarily diverse array of articles by best-selling authors, distinguished academics, and emerging voices, on topics ranging from the ethics of genetically cloned pets to “tele-cocooning” to the politics of search engines. The contributions also represent an unusual mixture of established and independent, print and online publications, including The New Yorker, Wired, Salon, The New Republic, Slate and The New York Times Magazine.
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