Amazon Founder's Wife Writes 1-Star Review for Book About Husband

MacKenzie Bezos criticized a new book about Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) the best way the wife of founder Jeff Bezos could -- she gave it a one-star review on Amazon.

The book, called “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,” was published last month and received attention for providing an inside look at Amazon’s founding.

In a review posted on Monday, MacKenzie Bezos suggested the book has factual errors and provides a “lopsided and misleading portrait of the people and culture at Amazon.” Bezos, who has been married to Jeff for 20 years, said quotes from Amazon employees don’t reflect the “majority viewpoint about working here.”

She also included positive messages that employees have written to the CEO, arguing the book leaves the wrong impression.

“For example, when the author does include people whose accounts of a supportive and inspiring culture contradict his thesis, he refers to them dismissively throughout the book as robots,” Bezos wrote.

Jonathan Leblang, director of Amazon’s Lab126, and former executive Rick Dalzell have also written reviews of the book. Leblang gave it four out of five stars, while Dalzell gave it three stars.

Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said the book's author, Brad Stone, didn't "fact-check claims made by former employees."

"He had every opportunity to thoroughly fact check and bring a more balanced viewpoint to his narrative, but he was very secretive about the book and simply chose not to," Berman said in a statement.

Stone, a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, is standing by the book but indicated he’s willing to make corrections, noting the e-book was already updated about a week ago.

“To the extent I made any mistakes, I’ll happily correct them,” he said.

Stone said he conducted interviews with over 300 people to “get their view of this very secretive company” and “get as close as possible to the central characters.”

Jeff Bezos declined to do an interview for the book, telling Stone he felt it was “too early to tell the Amazon story.” The book did draw on about a dozen prior interviews with the Amazon founder, Stone said.

In response to MacKenzie Bezos’s criticism, Stone said his only bias was to accurately represent the Amazon story. “I can assume I’m less biased than Jeff Bezos’s wife,” he said.

Stone added that he has no hard feelings after reading the review, saying he enjoyed reading Mackenzie Bezos’s latest novel, “Traps.”