Ben Mezrich (born February 7, 1969) is an American author from Princeton, New Jersey. Mezrich was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Molli Newman, a lawyer, and Dr. Reuben Mezrich, a chairman of radiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He graduated magna-cum-laude with a degree in Social Studies from Harvard University in 1991. Some of his books have been written under the pseudonym Holden Scott. Mezrich attended Princeton Day School, in Princeton, New Jersey. He is known for his non-fiction books. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He has been married to Tonya M. Chen since 2006. Mezrich is best known for his first non-fiction work, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. This book tells the story of a group of students from MIT who bet on blackjack games using a sophisticated card counting system, earning millions of dollars at casinos in Las Vegas and other gambling centers in the United States and the Caribbean. The story was made into the movie 21, released in 2008. Despite being categorized as non-fiction many of the characters in Bringing Down the House are composite characters and some of the events described have been contested by the people the characters are based on. In 2004, Mezrich published a new book called Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions. Also a nonfiction work, this book recounts the exploits of an American named John Malcolm, who was an assistant securities trader. In 2005 Mezrich published Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees a semi-sequel to Bringing Down the House. The book tells the story of another student involved in a similar Blackjack team, but one that used more advanced techniques than the ones discussed in the first book. As with Bringing Down the House many of the events depicted in Busting Vegas were later contested by main character Semyon Dukach who described the book as "only about half true". In 2007, Mezrich published Rigged which recounts a largely fictional account of the formation of what would eventually become the Dubai Mercantile Exchange by two young visionaries, one in the New York Mercantile Exchange and the other in the Dubai Ministry of Finance. Mezrich published a new book in July 2009 about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, titled The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal. It debuted at No. 4 on the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller List, and No. 1 on the Boston Globe Nonfiction Bestseller List, and the subsequent controversy surrounding it earned Mezrich the nickname "The Jackie Collins of Silicon Valley." In a recent interview on Conspiracy Worldwide Radio, Mezrich discussed his relationship with Zuckerberg and his motivation when writing the book. The Social Network, a movie based on the book was released on October 1, 2010. It stars Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin. The screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin. Books: Threshold (1996) Reaper (1998) Fertile Ground (1999) Skin (a story set as an X-Files episode), (2000) Skeptic (written under the pen name Holden Scott), (2000) The Carrier (written under the pen name Holden Scott), (2001) Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (2002) Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions (2004) Busting Vega$: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees (2005) Rigged: The Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, From Wall Street to Dubai (2007) The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (2009) Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History (2011) Straight Flush: The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Online Poker Empire—and How It All Came Crashing Down . . . (2013) Mezrich is the co-host of season 3 of the GSN series The World Series of Blackjack and the World Blackjack Tour. He also represented Massachusetts as a contestant in the Sexiest Bachelor in America Pageant on Fox in 2000. Fatal Error is a TBS premiere movie adaptation of his second book, Reaper, starring Antonio Sabato, Jr. and Robert Wagner. Skin was originally written as an X-Files episode. Rigged was optioned by Mark Cuban's 2929 as well as "Q" a work of fiction by Mezrich. Ugly Americans has been optioned by Summit, the screenplay was written by Robert Schenkkan, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of The Quiet American, and a draft also completed by Mezrich himself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Mezrich Image by premier.gov.ru [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

• published: 24 Aug 2013
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