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

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Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions ReviewAuthor Ben Mezrich is on the streak of a lifetime, with his top-selling, wildly flawed, heavily fictionalized "history" of a well-known blackjack team getting made into a movie by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Pretty impressive. MGM, after all, as Mezrich notes in a recent interview, is "the same company that owns most of the large casinos in Vegas." (See the February, 2004 Kuro5hin interview at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/5/5855/53465.) The only problem with this observation, like many of the major and minor details in Mezrich's book, is that it isn't true. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the movie company, and MGM Mirage, the casino company, are totally separate corporations, just as Mezrich's Las Vegas and the real Nevada town are totally different. Mezrich may be the only gambling writer in America who doesn't know these elementary facts.
For four years I've supported myself and my family by counting cards in American casinos and winning at blackjack. It is a tense, weird, exhilirating life, and I would love for more of my friends to understand it. This book doesn't help. Not only is the grade-school prose tedious. Not only are the technical blackjack details, on those few occasions when Mezrich summons the pluck to try tackling them, incorrect or misleading. The dramatic structure gropes and falls flat. The journalism is scandalously lazy and erroneous. Above all, the spirit, the eclat that card counters muster to wage our little war against casinoland is missing. Mezrich doesn't get it and can't report it. He hasn't been there and he doesn't know, his scanty experimental plays with MIT alums notwithstanding. If you want to know what gamblers are like and how we live, skip this drivel.
Look instead at legendary hustler Amarillo Slim's new memoir, Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People. Look at Jesse May's insuperable poker novel, Shut Up and Deal, which more than any other book depicts the dark heart of the professional player. If it's blackjack history and the activities of the major teams you're into, read Ken Uston. If you want to understand the technical aspects of the game, get Don Schlesinger, Arnold Snyder, Peter Griffin, and, for old time's sake, Ed Thorpe. If you want to learn how a notorious high-stakes counter makes his way in the world, read Ian Andersen's Burning the Tables in Las Vegas. There's so much good gambling writing out there, with so much real-life experience underlying it, that wasting time and money on Mezrich is a sucker's bet.Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions Overview

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Swimming in the Daylight: An American Student, a Soviet-Jewish Dissident, and the Gift of Hope Review

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Swimming in the Daylight: An American Student, a Soviet-Jewish Dissident, and the Gift of Hope ReviewSwimming in the Daylight is a remarkable and inspiring book. I think it is fundamentally a story about the profound power that can arise from deep and meaningful friendships. Lisa Paul's memoir of her years living in Moscow reminds us that when we take the time to truly connect with others, we give ourselves and our friends the gift of hope and the courage to act on our faith, ideals, and beliefs. Lisa Paul transports the reader to the Soviet Union of the 1980s when a repressive government silenced many voices. Because Lisa wrote the book from such a personal perspective, I actually felt her friends' fear and anxiety as she described their lives. Her narrative allows her friends to be heard in a way they were not when they lived in Moscow.
In the end, Swimming in the Daylight put me in awe of peoples' capacity for love, compassion, hope and active social justice. Lisa Paul had a truly remarkable experience in Moscow and, later, in the U.S. as she crusaded for human rights and dignity. We are lucky she chose to share her story.Swimming in the Daylight: An American Student, a Soviet-Jewish Dissident, and the Gift of Hope Overview
'A powerful memoir about hope, courage, and faith. . . . The lessons of this book are urgently needed today."-Dr. Alan Mittleman, Chair Department of Jewish Thought, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
There is always some part of the world where human rights are trampled and oppression quashes the human spirit. In the 1980s, it was the Soviet Union. In Swimming in the Daylight, Lisa Paul, a Catholic-American student living in Moscow in the early '80s, details how she grew to understand the perverse reality of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet regime as her friendship with her Russian-language tutor, Inna Kitrosskaya Meiman, blossomed. Inna, a Soviet-Jewish dissident and refusenik, was repeatedly denied a visa to receive life-saving cancer treatment abroad. The refusal was an apparent punishment imposed on both her and her Jewish husband, Naum, for his participation in the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group-the lone group fighting for human rights in the U.S.S.R.Before Lisa returned to the United States, she promised Inna she would do all she could to get her out of Moscow. But Lisa was one person, what could she possibly do that would make a difference? Inspired by her faith and rights as an American, Lisa staged a hunger strike, held press conferences, and galvanized American politicians to demand Inna's immediate release. In this heartfelt, compassionate, and inspiring narrative, Lisa brings the reader along with her as she learns indelible lessons from her heroic teacher. Inna's greatest lesson-that it is possible to swim through treacherous waters, in daylight, not in despair-is as relevant today as it was during the final years of the Soviet regime. At a time when international strife seems insurmountable and worries at home seem to paralyze, this story will teach people everywhere that it is the courage inside, not the chaos outside, that defines us. 20 color photographs

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It Doesn't Take A Genius: Five Truths to Inspire Success in Every Student Review

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It Doesn't Take A Genius: Five Truths to Inspire Success in Every Student ReviewThis book is a fascinating mix of direct and indirect communication. The book's basic points are made directly
by its coauthors and then exemplified indirectly by the vignettes provided by an interesting assemblage of their
former students. The coauthors' arguments are clear and unlittered with academic jargon. (For example, what
academics would call "intertextuality" is discussed without invoking the guild's current buzzword.) Many of the
brief student contributions are surprisingly moving.
In characterizing one of Tommie Lindey's emphases, a student writer (Joseph Riley Whitfield Jr.) in fact aptly
describes the book: "...a complex message delivered in common language [that] does not lose its sense of
the profound."
My advice to readers would be to read each of the "five truths" sections, breaking off reading after each to ponder
what it means for them. Considered and pondered, the book has practical and uplifting messages that have made, and will make, a difference.It Doesn't Take A Genius: Five Truths to Inspire Success in Every Student Overview
Two award-winning educators give you strategies to reachout and instill skills for success in your kids or students

With multiple teaching awards to their credit, Tommie Lindsey and Randall McCutcheon have taught every type of student--from the underprivileged to the ordinary. It Doesn't Take a Genius gives you first-hand access to the strategies that have inspired students to succeed, even in impoverished districts.

Entertaining and packed with practical advice, this motivating narrative is organized into five principles, each composed of "bite-size" lessons and testimonials from the teachers' greatest success stories.
(20051201)

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