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Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
by Ben Mezrich

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/514313.Bringing_Down_the_House_The_Inside_Story_of_Six_MIT_Students_Who_Took_Vegas_for_Millions?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1175443045m/514313.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/514313.Bringing_Down_the_House_The_Inside_Story_of_Six_MIT_Students_Who_Took_Vegas_for_Millions?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2850.Ben_Mezrich">Ben Mezrich</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/13286002?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 1 of 5 stars I disliked Bringing Down the House, and can't understand why everyone I know who's read it has raved about it.
 
 I'll grant that it's an interesting story. But you know what? It's a sufficiently interesting story that it doesn't need to be sexed up with outright bullshit. Even accounting for the fact that the characters in the book are composites of several actual people, probably 25% of what's left is just pure fiction. He's got one scene where one of the team is beaten up in a bathroom in a Bahamanian casino. It never happened. He's got the principal character taking his final blackjack exam in an underground casino in Chinatown. Never happened. He details one of the team having his apartment broken into, and a safe with $75,000 in it pried out of the wall and stolen. Never. Happened.
 
 This *weakens my interest*. One of the potentially interesting things about this story is how the modern, corporate Vegas would respond to an organized ring of counters. This book doesn't tell you that, because it's so full of bullshit you can't trust anything it has to say on the topic.
 
 
 And, oh lord, is the dialogue horrible. Hollywood does this a lot: Character A explains something to Character B, but he's really not explaining it to Character B, he's explaining it to the audience. Done properly, this is okay; you don't notice it, it flows, and it tells the audience what's going on without condescending to them. Done improperly, it's annoying as fuck; the worst parts of Casino Royale were the bits with the twit in the casino explaining how poker works to the presumably incredibly competent agent sent by the British government to keep an eye on the money.
 
 Virtually every piece of dialogue in this book is like that. And there's no excuse for it in a book; characters don't have to pretend to explain something to someone who already understands it just to inform the reader, because the fucking narrator can just explain that thing to the reader directly. It's not just annoying, it's lazy, bad writing.
 
 Mezrich explains why he's a lazy, bad writer:
 
 I'm not looking to use big words," Mezrich admits. "I write for people who if they weren't reading my book, they wouldn't be reading another book. They would be watching TV. I'm not competing with other books. I'm competing with the Red Sox." Mezrich works hard to build the excitement early in his plots, before attention spans wane. He gets right to it in Rigged, explaining in the first few pages the main character's involvement with the shady world of the New York Mercantile Exchange: "If Wall Street was the financial equivalent of Vegas, the Merc was Atlantic City—on crack.
 
 
 
 This book is crap - on crack. And it's a shame, because there's an interesting true story under all the dross.
 
 You want a good book to read, on a similar subject? Go buy The Eudaemonic Pie. It's about a bunch of grad students from UC Santa Cruz who, in the 70s, designed and built wearable computers intended to let them beat the house at roulette. And it's good. It's also not tarted up.
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/820967?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Brian's review
rating:

** spoiler alert ** I disliked Bringing Down the House, and can't understand why everyone I know who's read it has raved about it.

I'll grant that it's an interesting story. But you know what? It's a sufficiently interesting story that it doesn't need to be sexed up with outright bullshit. Even accounting for the fact that the characters in the book are composites of several actual people, probably 25% of what's left is just pure fiction. He's got one scene where one of the team is beaten up in a bathroom in a Bahamanian casino. It never happened. He's got the principal character taking his final blackjack exam in an underground casino in Chinatown. Never happened. He details one of the team having his apartment broken into, and a safe with $75,000 in it pried out of the wall and stolen. Never. Happened.

This *weakens my interest*. One of the potentially interesting things about this story is how the modern, corporate Vegas would respond to an organized ring of counters. This book doesn't tell you t...more I disliked Bringing Down the House, and can't understand why everyone I know who's read it has raved about it.

I'll grant that it's an interesting story. But you know what? It's a sufficiently interesting story that it doesn't need to be sexed up with outright bullshit. Even accounting for the fact that the characters in the book are composites of several actual people, probably 25% of what's left is just pure fiction. He's got one scene where one of the team is beaten up in a bathroom in a Bahamanian casino. It never happened. He's got the principal character taking his final blackjack exam in an underground casino in Chinatown. Never happened. He details one of the team having his apartment broken into, and a safe with $75,000 in it pried out of the wall and stolen. Never. Happened.

This *weakens my interest*. One of the potentially interesting things about this story is how the modern, corporate Vegas would respond to an organized ring of counters. This book doesn't tell you that, because it's so full of bullshit you can't trust anything it has to say on the topic.

And, oh lord, is the dialogue horrible. Hollywood does this a lot: Character A explains something to Character B, but he's really not explaining it to Character B, he's explaining it to the audience. Done properly, this is okay; you don't notice it, it flows, and it tells the audience what's going on without condescending to them. Done improperly, it's annoying as fuck; the worst parts of Casino Royale were the bits with the twit in the casino explaining how poker works to the presumably incredibly competent agent sent by the British government to keep an eye on the money.

Virtually every piece of dialogue in this book is like that. And there's no excuse for it in a book; characters don't have to pretend to explain something to someone who already understands it just to inform the reader, because the fucking narrator can just explain that thing to the reader directly. It's not just annoying, it's lazy, bad writing.

Mezrich explains why he's a lazy, bad writer:

I'm not looking to use big words," Mezrich admits. "I write for people who if they weren't reading my book, they wouldn't be reading another book. They would be watching TV. I'm not competing with other books. I'm competing with the Red Sox." Mezrich works hard to build the excitement early in his plots, before attention spans wane. He gets right to it in Rigged, explaining in the first few pages the main character's involvement with the shady world of the New York Mercantile Exchange: "If Wall Street was the financial equivalent of Vegas, the Merc was Atlantic City—on crack.

This book is crap - on crack. And it's a shame, because there's an interesting true story under all the dross.

You want a good book to read, on a similar subject? Go buy The Eudaemonic Pie. It's about a bunch of grad students from UC Santa Cruz who, in the 70s, designed and built wearable computers intended to let them beat the house at roulette. And it's good. It's also not tarted up....less

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