I’d heard of this book many times because it’s cited as the inspiration for the film ‘21’. It’s such an amusing and incongruous story of MIT maths wizards posing as high rollers and trying to outsmart mafioso casino bosses, it would be a shame if it hadn’t. Beyond being about and describing an incredibly good story, I didn’t find that much to enjoy in the book.
Some of my disappointment might have come from the context in which I read it. Having just finished ‘A Man for All Markets’ by Edward Thorp, I thought ‘Bringing The House Down’ would make a good follow up. Especially given that I've been meaning to read it for more than a decade. In reading Thorp’s autobiography, I had basically heard an earlier version of the same story. This made most of the blackjack background and other explanatory sections in this book redundant. It was also difficult to tell if these sections were helpful and clear because I already knew the material and couldn’t be impartial. On the whole, I preferred the style and content of Thorp’s account. Much of the same material is covered but Thorp’s is more matter of fact and he goes into more detail on the technical aspects of his systems. Clearly, they’re very different types of book but it undoubtedly affected my reading of this book.
The author uses various styles of writing at different points through the book. In some he narrates the lives of the protagonists rather than profiling them and this has the effect of making it read more like a screenplay. I haven’t seen the film but these sections of the book had an ambience of over-emphasis and breathless exaggeration. I would’ve preferred less dialogue, which is always tricky to get right. The author has clearly done his homework and the background information for the characters is strong. This made me wish for more of this type of material. I infinitely preferred the well researched backstories to the central casting descriptions of the Las Vegas high life accompanied by a similarly stock script. Some sections are written in the first person when he meets people from the story for interviews after the event. These tended to have a journalist tone to them. I also had the suspicion that the story had been cleaned up a lot for public consumption but this is to be expected. The presentation of Vegas and the gambling world was seedy, but in a very Hollywood way. Perhaps the author wisely had an eye to future film rights when he was writing it or, more plausibly in my eyes, the protagonists wanted a more family friendly version!
For such a famous and high selling book, I was a bit surprised the writing wasn’t better. It’s extremely easy to read, which is probably the most important factor for a best seller. Nonetheless, some of the writing was clunky. The sentence, ‘His family tree was made up of so many different races, you needed a pie chart to buy him a birthday present.’ (p17) magnificently muddles the imagery of pies and trees. It also made me wonder how many people are giving birthday gifts based on ancestral ethnicity and, if there are any weirdos like this, how many of them are using pie charts to help with the more complex cases?! I thought it was an absurdly bad sentence.
Perhaps I’ve been a bit harsh on this book. It gives a good general explanation of the field, narrates a wonderfully entertaining story and ultimately presents a lot of background and material in a highly readable 300 odd pages. However, perhaps reading a book I enjoyed more about the same subject directly before reading this one has made me unduly harsh! I would certainly recommend this book because it’s a good story but I didn’t think it was an especially good book.
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