Monday, August 1, 2011

The Accidental Billionaires/ Ben Mezrich

The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich technology, social networking, biography, business 272 pages

This book was always on my "to-read" list because the story of the founding of Facebook is an extremely interesting one. The book, unfortunately, lost a lot of its appeal when last year's smash hit movie "The Social Network" came out and told the same story in a much more convenient format. Obviously the book is a more detailed account, but for the most part, reading this book made me appreciate the movie even more because they were pretty damn loyal to the account in the book. For those of you who have already seen the film version, only read this if you have nothing else to fill your time, because it's going to seem repetitive when compared with the truncated movie plot. For those of you who haven't seen the movie, this is a must read, but you should also make sure that the rock you've been living under has a light source to read by, because it was one of last year's biggest movies.

The only advantages that readers of the book will have over casual film goers is that they will understand some portions of the story that were glamorized to make the story more Hollywood. The most notable of these is that Sean Parker, the Napster founder who is played by Justin Timberlake in the movie, is as big of a computer nerd as Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. The movie makes him out to be this cool man around town, but the truth is that he's almost as awkward as the story's two geeky protagonists. Details like this are rewarding, but i'm not sure if they make the book totally worth my time.

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