the last book I ever read (dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era, excerpt eight)

from John Cassidy's dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era:

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com’s founder, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 12, 1964. His parents separated before his birth, and he never knew his biological father. Bezos’s mother remarried a Cuban immigrant, Miguel Bezos, a petroleum engineer for Exxon. From an early age, Bezos was an overachiever. At Palmetto High School in Pensacola, Florida, where he was the valedictorian of the class of 1982, he wrote a term paper entitled “The Effect of Zero Gravity on the Aging Rate of the Common Housefly,” which won him a trip to NASA. His valedictorian speech was a call for man to colonize space. He got a place at Princeton, where he entered the honors physics program but switched to electrical engineering and computer science after he discovered that other students were even smarter than he was.