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Made for Hollywood: Ben Mezrich

August 25, 2008

Lots of you ask, “What are you reading these days?”  Yesterday I managed to finish Rigged, by Ben Mezrich.  Ben has been a favorite ’summer’ author of mine for quite some time.  He wrote ‘Bringing Down the House’ also called ‘Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees’ in 2005.  The book was turned into a movie called 21.  Around the same time as ‘Busting Vegas or Breaking Vegas (as it was known in paperback) was released he wrote ‘Ugly Americans: A True Story of High Stakes, Dirty Deals and One Man’s $500 Million Gamble.’  His books are interesting on a number of levels.  First, they don’t take much attention to read (i.e. you don’t have to concentrate very hard to enjoy them).  Second, they are ALWAYS ‘high concept’ involving youth, money and risk - BUT you get a payoff in that you learn something.  Ben’s latest book is called ‘Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai‘.

Rigged was a fun little book from start to finish.  Ben’s description of the New York Merchantile Exchange was facinating.  Amazon explains it better than I would, “After conquering the hallowed halls of Harvard Business School, he enters the testosterone-laced warrens of the Merc Exchange, the asylumlike oil exchange located in lower Manhattan. A place where billions of dollars trade hands every week, the Merc is like a casino on crack, where former garbagemen become millionaires overnight and where fistfights break out on the trading floor. This ordinary kid has traded Brooklyn for the gold-lined hotel palaces of Dubai. He keeps company on the decks of private yachts in Monte Carlo—teeming with half-naked girls flown in by Saudi sheiks—and makes deals in the dangerous back alleys of Beijing. But the Merc is just a starting place. Taken under the wing of another young gun and partnering with a mysterious young Muslim, the kid embarks on a dangerous adventure to revolutionize the oil trading industry—and, along with it, the world. Rigged is the explicit, exclusive, true story behind the headlines that dominate the world stage.”

Fun, light reading that will surely find its way onto a theater screen near you next summer!

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog, Personal 

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