21 DOG YEARS: Doing Time at Amazon.com

In 1998, Daisey gave up his life of frequenting cafes, temping and participating in small-time theater to join an up-and-coming bookseller called Amazon.com. Here, he offers a kind of workplace coming-of-age memoir—the young hero comes to terms with his ambition, synthesizes it with his liberal arts education and finally spits it out. All the dot-com punching bags are here: the lampooning of new economy jargon, the girlfriend worrying about her boyfriend's sudden obsession with the company picnic, and jokes about Pets.com. What saves the book from being an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel is Daisey's sharp eye: he renders even banal corporate moments with energy and wit. (On a clueless colleague: "No one does tai chi at ten am in front of their coworkers around a coffee kettle unless they want to be hated.") Class-conscious to the point of obsession—he has ambivalent thoughts about his "startlingly sharp, attractive" managers and dreams of "social hacking" his way into becoming a Net executive—Daisey flirts with a broader social critique of bourgeois values. Still, his incessant flippancy blocks real insight. At the end, when an imaginary e-mail to CEO Jeff Bezos turns unexpectedly vicious, readers may wonder how a man so aware of—and so glib about—his employer's flaws comes to play the role of the exploited proletarian. Still, Daisey's talent for the punch line, along with his facility for sketch comedy, makes the book an enjoyable, if unedifying, experience, like an afternoon playing foosball. Agent, Dan Greenberg. (June)