A Review of Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich

The full title of Ben Mezrich's book about the MIT blackjack team is Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. It purports to be nonfiction, but the reality is that many of the events in the book never took place at all. And the events that did take place in the book were often exaggerate to make for more interesting reading.

I have a problem with the book from the very get-go. A book should either be fiction or nonfiction. I have no problem with the idea of writing a novel based on the real life adventures of the MIT card counting team, and that seems to be exactly what Ben Mezrich has done with this book. The problem is that it's sold as nonfiction, when in reality, the book is a novel. This review will focus mostly on how good a novel it is, since it's common knowledge that the book isn't historically accurate.

The protagonist of Bringing Down the House is Kevin Lewis who, unsurprisingly, is a student at MIT. He's recruited by a couple of other students at MIT to play on Micky Rosa's card counting team in the early 1990's. Neither Micky Rosa nor Kevin Lewis are real people; they're both based on real people, though. Eventually, personality conflicts result in the breakup of the team.

I'm no literary critic, but I do have a degree in Literature, so I feel qualified to speak to the quality of the prose in this book. It's bad. Bringing Down the House reads as if it hadn't been edited, almost as if it were a first draft. The story is compelling enough at times, but it's so poorly told that the book was hard to finish.

If you're really interested in blackjack, then you'll probably enjoy Bringing Down the House, but I think a more interesting book could have been written that was actually historically accurate. I'm so offended by the billing of this book as nonfiction when it is in fact fiction that I'm really not even able to write a non-biased review of the book at all.

But apparently my opinion is not shared, as the book spawned a sequel, also from Ben Mezrich, titled Busting Vegas. I've read it too, and it's no better than Bringing Down the House. In fact, it didn't just spawn a sequel--it was made into a film, 21, which was even worse than the book.

Ben Mezrich has gone on to write another book (The Accidental Billionaires) about Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. This one was turned into a movie called The Social Network, which was hugely popular, and I'm sure it made Ben Mezrich into a wealthy man. But my understanding is that The Accidental Billionaires is inaccurate as well.