Product Description

From the author who brought you the massive New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House, this is the startling rags-to-riches story of an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn who claws his way into the wild, frenetic world of the oil exchange.

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #426947 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-23
• Released on: 2007-10-23
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

About the Author

Ben Mezrich has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House (now a Sony picture starring Kevin Spacey). He is a columnist for Boston Common and a contributor for Flush magazine (London). He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

"Non-fiction" written as a bad novel
I first encountered Ben Mezrich when I read his book "Bringing Down the House" about a team of MIT blackjack card counters. The book was weak, but I put this down to the fact that the author was a fiction writer and this was his first work of journalism. Unfortunately, Mr. Mezrich's feel for journalism has not improved since then. In fact, I think that it's safe to say that journalism or even a good term paper is beyond Mr. Mezrich.

One of the most staggering weaknesses of "Rigged" is that Mr. Mezrich seems to know nothing about modern markets and computer driven trading. What passes for his journalism seems to be nothing more than interviews with a few people, which he then embellishes to the point where I would not believe anything I read in his books. Mezrich does very little research and does not interview the range of people that would add any depth to his books. He is, in effect, writing a "non-fiction" novel.

The best part of Mezrich's books is his description of the New York Merc. floor traders. Mezrich seems to understand on some level that these "Meatheads" are vestiges of a rapidly fading trading era. Apparently Mezrich has never visited any of the equally huge trading floors run by large companies that trade even larger volumns via computer. There he would have seen huge networks of computer systems and staffed by highly intelligent traders. Mezrich does not even seem to have any idea that something like computer model driven trading exists.

Computer driven trading is what drives markets now. The topic of the book is the construction of an oil trading center in Daubi. Along with technology, Mezrich seems to have missed any issues involving the political and economic forces in the Middle East and Asia which might drive the creation of this exchange. The book has all the feel of a work that has been hacked out in a few months.

If Mezrich wrote like the young Hunter S. Thompson all this might be forgivable. Unfortunately Mizrich is only an adequate writer. One virtue of his books is that their very simplicity makes them a quick read.

I am happy to say that I have gotten both of Mezrich's books I've read from the library. Unless your idea of excellent writing is Clive Cussler, I'd save my money.

Just slightly better than completely useless
I picked up this book hoping it might be something on the order of "Liars Poker" or "Barbarians at the Gates" or "The Pay Pal Wars," books that imparted huge amounts of information about the businesses that they covered. Boy, was I ever disappointed.

Mezrich's characters are suitable for comic books, the business concepts he imparts are perhaps the level that would be explained to fourth-graders on a field trip, and the plot is close to non-existent. I'd say his writing is boring but it seldom rises to that level.

I trade futures and FOREX, so I know a bit about markets and finance. Most of the narrative-type business books I have read give me at least one or two important pieces of information about the business itself. What Mezrich imparts about the Merc can be put into a one-page pamphlet.

I was most of the way through this piece of dreck when I realized what the point of this book was-- Mezrich is hoping to land a movie script. He tried to write it simple and shallow enough for Hollywood mogels to understand, and he tried to incorporate glitz and money and sex.

Save your money, save your time-- skip this book. Mr. C.S.

A Page Turner?
Hardly. This book was a chore. There was no excitement in this book whatsoever. I had to force myself to finish it. I wanted to double slap the main character more than once for being such a milquetoast. I kept waiting for the intrigue. Well, if that's what your after, don't bother buying this book, because there is none. This book is a terrible failure on Mezrich's part.