Rating: 
Summary: 21 dog years
Review: A quick funny read. Helps draw a very fine picture of a behind the scene look of a major dot com when they were still learning to crawl. I hope I never hire an employee like him though. A great book for those of us who didn't have the guts or chance to take a shot at a dot .. roller coaster.
Rating:
Summary: A painfully accurate tale
Review: Mike tells it like it is. All the euphoria of the late nieties. The realization it was all a lie. The soul searching to find out what it all meant. A great read for those of us who survived the the call center. Or are still caught,
Rating:
Summary: Buy This Book And Laugh Your Head Off!
Review: Mike Daisey, self-styled "slacker" and "dilettante" finds himself forced to accept his first real job--guess where?--at our favorite company, amazon.com. And according to him it was a disaster. He loves the excitement of the company, he loves Jeff Bezos, he drives his family nuts with amazon[.com] slogans and mantras, but he is a lousy employee. He may have been the worst customer service rep in the company's short history. See, he doesn't like work and so, mostly, he doesn't do any. And as he tells us about his misadventures he makes fun of everything that happened. The company, the dot-com bubble, the fellow employees, and mostly--himself.And that is what makes the book funny, and not just silly. Mike is a man who can laugh deeply at himself. And as he laughed at himself and built his shortcomings to unbelievable proportions, he had me laughing with him. I haven't laughed this hard in years. Mike is the Dave Barry of dot-com. And, in spite of his total ineptitude in customer service he is a man you want to like, a man with heart, a man who has a good woman who stays with him and keeps him grounded. Now, in his post-corporate incarnation, Mike is doing performance art and his book is ranked no. 1967 (today) on amazon.com. Not bad for a slacker. Buy this book today and laugh your head off!
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant
Review: True confession. I listened to the unabridged audiobook of "21 Dog Years" and had to swear off eating at the same time for fear I would choke to death from laughing so hard. I loved this book!
Rating: 
Summary: More a stand up routine than a book....
Review: This book was not really what I expected. The user seems to be preparing for a standup comedy routine, as oppossed to writing a book. Everything is flip, off the cuff and, most importantly, not funny. Ok, I did chuckle ONCE, but all in all a very weak effort. The whole "poor me, I am such a slacker so I must be funny" schtick is old. Mr. Daisey, you should have saved your time writing and just gone and gotten a job. Save your money - skip this.
Rating:
Summary: dhennes
Review: Mike Daisey's account on the inner workings of Amazon.com was great! He gives the reader an insight into the good, the bad and the ugly at the Internet giant. Its an easy read and really enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: Light fare about a slacker
Review: This book is a short history of Mr. Daisey's employment at Amazon.com, containing several humerous anecdotes but overall is best described as "diary of a slacker." His view of Amazon.com is skewed in a bizarre manner because of his ineptitude or boredom at work combined with a passion for the Amazon culture. There are various errors which nerds will not enjoy, such as a reference to a Star Wars DVD which does not exist of course (the original film) and so on. The author takes pot shots at Microsoft because it is easy to do of course, and is often wrong about his assumptions of Microsoft. When I describe this book as "diary of a slacker" I mean to say that this guy basically cheats his way through work, having no skill or passion for his job, wanting a payoff or to be part of things without putting in the energy. Then he quits for whatever reason to become unemployed, with later sentiments revealing some anger at Amazon that laid-off employees express, but wait - you weren't laid off dude, you quit. The love/hate relationship he has with Amazon is confusing to me. It's more of an irrational obsession or maybe just a lust to be associated with a thing and then profit from it.
Rating:
Summary: The Strain Induced by Avoiding Reviewer Attack
Review: It pains me to veer past the [slap] needed for those confused by the purpose of this book. Anyone picking this up with any intent of creating the next internet brand or propping up the metrics of their own miserable failure will probably bother to continue reading MY rant. Frankly, it's exactly the failures of a mantra-centric corporation to get Mike to buck up that amuse me most. This is about Mike Daisey bending himself into an unnatural experience and distancing himself from feelings that would have been perfectly natural months before taking the pill. It's changing yourself into your perception of success by dealing with a lot of friction that can only be tolerated through the greed of waiting for options to vest. Before much of the money was his, he bails. It just wasn't worth it. With dotcom employee morale at a rock bottom and profits in a few hands at best, hopefully these experiences can snap a few companies out of their coma and focusing on their most important resource, their people... I dropped one star off the rating because I could have lasted another hundred pages, and I'm fairly confident Mike could have made them worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Don't look for Amazon secrets. Look for laughter.
Review: This is an INCREDIBLY humorous book. If you are looking for the secrets of the .COMs, find another book. This book is packed with interesting stories, well written, and very funny. If you have a choice between the book and the unabridged audio, get the audio as the author/reader does a masterful job and makes the funny material even funnier.
Rating:
Summary: Unexpected Grace
Review: Like Mike Daisey I moved to Seattle in the 1990's as a "white liberal arts graduate with an uncertain future," thus joining a slew of disaffected slackers and temps. So I was looking forward to a Michael Mooreish book which poked bitter fun at the Fat Corporate Giant. I wanted dark humor and shocking facts. And I'll admit, as someone who once submitted a resume to Amazon, I was looking for a book about how depressing things were behind the Techno Curtain. I got some of what I expected. 21 Dog Years is funny. I brought the book to dinner, and my partner had to ask me not to snort so much, as it affected his appetite. It's more Letterman-funny than Moore-funny, though, and we're talking the kinder, gentler, post-heart surgery Letterman. It's also somewhat bitter and anti-corporate. Daisey does a wonderful job of nailing down the miasma of misery that permeated the culture of Seattle 20-somethings in the 1990's. He uses imaginary emails to Jeff Bezos (Amazon's top dog) to channel some of that bitterness. Though the book is short on shocking facts, Daisey describes pranks he pulled as an employee just to get through his shift, such as sending free books to random people and hanging up on every 4th or 5th caller to keep his phone response time down. As a Seattleite, I particularly enjoyed his decription of local scenes and events, such as Amazon's party the morning the Kingdome was imploded. What I didn't expect was this book's greatest gift to me as a reader: sudden moments of clarity and grace. Daisey's book is more beauty than bile, more vitality than vitriole. The book is written about Daisey's ambivalent relationship with Amazon, and he writes about it with equal parts of awe and understanding. Sudden moments of holiness pop up throughout the prose. His description of a scene with Babcia (his wife's grandmother), scenes with Jean-Michele (his wife), and the context in which he places his ex-obsession after September 11th are all examples of this. All in all, this was a very satisfying book.
| 
