I mean, like, well, it was AWESOMELY awesome. Craig Winn was the great genius of e-tailing. No, he was more than that, a revolutionary, no, a visionary greater than Thomas Jefferson or George Washington. And we all were, just AWESOMELY brilliant and we were going to be really, really rich, too! Craig was going to be governor of Virginia and then president of the United States!

Apologies, dear readers. I made this paragraph up. But it captures the frothy writing style of J. David Kuo in his intriguing yet annoying new book "dot.bomb." For less than a year, Kuo headed public relations for Value America, Winn’s Internet-based retailer based in Charlottesville. His insider’s account describes the disaster that befell this poster child of 1990s dot-com frenzy — the arrogance of Winn and his sycophants, the illogic of their business plans and the obnoxious materialism of the youthful, overnight millionaires whose trappings included $1,000-a-night hookers, private jets, Tuscan getaways and show-off cars.

The son of a middle-class salesman, Winn arrived in Charlottesville in 1996 from California brimming with ideas of "converging" retail and the fast-growing Internet. Never mind that his last business, a lamp outlet, had failed miserably. He claimed that by using the Net for inventory-less shopping, Value America would truly revolutionize retail. Customers would need only log onto Value America’s home page and let their fingers do the shopping. The goods would arrive painlessly at their doors.

Winn’s brazen sales pitches caught the dot-com wave at just the right moment. During an initial public offering in April 1999, Value America’s stock opened at $23 per share and popped up to $63 before tumbling irrecoverably. That’s about the time Kuo, a young Republican fund-raiser and ex-CIA employee (or so Kuo claims), came on board.

According to Kuo’s breathless and gossipy account, Winn’s corporate culture was a series of college-style all-nighters, constant chaos and revival-style speeches. Such tremendous energy boosted Winn’s personal wealth to more than $300 million, at least on paper. He built himself an estate called "Winndom" on 125-acres near Charlottesville and installed seven miles of new stone fences — the perfect "old" setting for a nouveau riche exec. Value America bought a top-of-the-line corporate jet to impress stock analysts and zip key staffers to quick vacations.

Deeply religious, Winn caught the eyes of other evangelists, notably the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who acted as a rainmaker and offered his Lynchburg television studio to make ads. The controversial preacher was just one of a series of Winn’s curious contacts. Although some on Wall Street shunned him as a charlatan, his circle of advisers included such celebrities as Henry Kissinger, Federal Express founder Fred Smith and Reagan national security advisor Robert (Bud) McFarlane.

Kuo reveals that Winn was so impressed with himself that he talked to LeClair Ryan, the hot, high-tech law firm in Richmond, about running for governor then for U.S. president. Winn displayed his delusion of self-importance when he said at a political strategy session: "This is all about public service. I mean, for me, moving to the Virginia governor’s mansion or even to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue means moving to a worse house in a worse neighborhood."

Winn’s political ambitions proved as fleeting as his paper fortune, however. Value America was a house of cards. Winn couldn’t decide whether to concentrate on selling low-end products directly to consumers or break into the potentially lucrative business of government Web buying. He was constantly ginning up co-branding schemes with such big names as FedEx and Citibank and then announcing them before they jelled. His capriciousness led to a corporate coup that ousted a mature CEO who might have saved the company.

Despite the glowing press (including, sadly, a glowing cover story from this magazine), analysts knew the truth. In a May 1999 report, Goldman Sachs rated Value America as the least likely of e-tailers to survive. Why? Successful ones such as Amazon.com made money selling high margin products such as books and CDs over the Net. Value America sold low margin personal computers. The company’s gross margins, Kuo writes, were an anemic 1 percent — so low that Goldman Sachs calculated that Value America would have to increase its revenues 150 times to turn a profit. Other serious problems included excessive marketing expenses and poor service. Kuo notes it took him months to get delivery of a fancy gas grill. The board canned Winn in December 1999, but not soon enough to save the company from dissolution.

Kuo’s naivete gets on your nerves, and he makes sloppy mistakes, such as misnaming Charlottesville billionaire John W. Kluge as "Paul" Kluge. Even so, his book captures the inane atmosphere of the Internet era. It pours cold water on the era’s great axioms, such as the one that profits don’t matter.