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bucketoffish 's review for:
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis, Stefan Alexander MacGillis
This book had a lot of interesting information in it, and it mentioned some facts about Amazon's business practices that would be of great concern if true. However, the extremely heavy-handed spin inserted liberally throughout the pages really undercut the message, and left me wondering how much of the author's claims were truthfully and accurately presented.
One technique which I really disliked was the extensive use of narrative biography, where the author would attempt to appeal to emotion by getting the reader to "know a character". He would tell a really intimate story about events in a person's life, and how they felt at major points in their careers, and how they reacted when good or bad stuff happened to them, etc. The fact that a lot of these characters have been dead for some time and the author could not possibly have known these details really drives home the fact that he's taking a lot of artistic license in these stories (a.k.a. just making stuff up) to try to manipulate the reader's emotions. Many of these characters didn't even have much if anything to do with Amazon. At one point the author talked about a guy who was killed in a tornado, and I think he was trying to insinuate that it was Amazon's fault somehow because the guy was an Amazon contractor. There were so many of these tangentially related segues that just felt like pure nonsense.
I also didn't like how the author tried really hard to spin his political views into the book. A lot of times when he had some critique of Amazon, he tried to tie it into the Republican party as well. I think he was really trying to make it seem that Amazon and Republicans were conspiring, and was insinuating that Amazon was making back-door deals with Republicans, and trying to get them into power, and using them to pass shady laws. This view of reality seems to have gone through an extremely heavy cognitive filter. After reading the book I looked up Amazon's political donation history and it's been split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans all the way back. When individual Amazon contributors are included, the contributions to Democrats are at least double those to Republicans, and in 2020 it was more like a ratio of 10 to 1. It appears the author is either ignoring or exaggerating half the story in order to push a political agenda. In either case, it makes the rest of his accounting also very suspect.
Anyway, my takeaway from this book is that Amazon might be engaging in some business practices that are very ethically questionable, and I'd like to look into it more. However, I absolutely cannot trust anything this author is telling me because of the extreme and blatant amounts of bias he puts into his writing.
One technique which I really disliked was the extensive use of narrative biography, where the author would attempt to appeal to emotion by getting the reader to "know a character". He would tell a really intimate story about events in a person's life, and how they felt at major points in their careers, and how they reacted when good or bad stuff happened to them, etc. The fact that a lot of these characters have been dead for some time and the author could not possibly have known these details really drives home the fact that he's taking a lot of artistic license in these stories (a.k.a. just making stuff up) to try to manipulate the reader's emotions. Many of these characters didn't even have much if anything to do with Amazon. At one point the author talked about a guy who was killed in a tornado, and I think he was trying to insinuate that it was Amazon's fault somehow because the guy was an Amazon contractor. There were so many of these tangentially related segues that just felt like pure nonsense.
I also didn't like how the author tried really hard to spin his political views into the book. A lot of times when he had some critique of Amazon, he tried to tie it into the Republican party as well. I think he was really trying to make it seem that Amazon and Republicans were conspiring, and was insinuating that Amazon was making back-door deals with Republicans, and trying to get them into power, and using them to pass shady laws. This view of reality seems to have gone through an extremely heavy cognitive filter. After reading the book I looked up Amazon's political donation history and it's been split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans all the way back. When individual Amazon contributors are included, the contributions to Democrats are at least double those to Republicans, and in 2020 it was more like a ratio of 10 to 1. It appears the author is either ignoring or exaggerating half the story in order to push a political agenda. In either case, it makes the rest of his accounting also very suspect.
Anyway, my takeaway from this book is that Amazon might be engaging in some business practices that are very ethically questionable, and I'd like to look into it more. However, I absolutely cannot trust anything this author is telling me because of the extreme and blatant amounts of bias he puts into his writing.