The Everything Store

Brad Stone opens *The Everything Store* with a tiny clue almost no one would have noticed. In the 1970s a Houston journalist named Julie Ray spent a year following a gifted-children's program and wrote a self-published book about it called *Turning On Bright Minds*. One thousand copies, rejected by every major publisher. In it she profiled a sixth-grader she called "Tim," who at twelve had built an "infinity cube" out of mirrors and batteries because the store-bought version cost twenty-two dollars and he could build his own for less. Tim also surveyed his teachers about the quality of their teaching, on the principle that it was not a popularity contest. His sixth-grade teacher told Ray that "there is probably no limit to what he can do, given a little guidance."

Tim was Jeff Bezos. By 2012 the company he started in a converted garage in Bellevue, Washington, was doing sixty-one billion dollars in annual sales and was on track to become the fastest retailer in history to reach one hundred billion. People in the industry had even coined a verb. To be "Amazoned" meant to watch helplessly as the upstart from Seattle vacuumed up your customers, your margins, and your future, all at once.

That is the book in one sentence. But the journey from infinity cubes to a hundred billion dollars is where the story actually lives, and Brad Stone, after fifteen years of reporting and more than three hundred interviews, set out to tell it without flinching. Bezos himself called the project "too early" and warned Stone about what he called the narrative fallacy, borrowed from Nassim Taleb: the human tendency to impose tidy stories on what is actually messy and accidental. All Amazon executives are required to read Taleb's *Black Swan*, partly so that they remember this. Stone takes the warning seriously, and then writes the narrative anyway, because someone had to.