Sex on the Moon, by Ben Mezrich

In 2002, Thad Roberts stole of some of the most rare and valuable items anywhere: moon rocks. Told in Mezrich's fictional non-fiction style, this is an entertaining romp telling how a brilliant kid with the world at his feet ended up in prison. Roberts is a fascinating person; raised in a strict Mormon household, when going on his mission trip he and his companions all told each other they'd already had sex. Roberts went one step further, though, and as he had been taught, confessed to his mission president. Instead of absolution, he was abruptly thrown out of the mission and the church, and after being returned home thrown out of his family as well. At nineteen years old, he was on his own with no support structure. From this inauspicious beginning, he reinvented himself as a scholar (majoring in geology, astronomy, and physics at the University of Utah) and an adrenalin junkie (becoming a pilot and a certified scuba instructor, and bicycling across the country), and eventually accepted into one of the most prestigious student programs in the country at NASA.

Why would such a confident and successful person commit such a public crime? The difficulty of the problem appealed to his intellectual side and the audacity of the act appealed to his daredevil side, but that is simply what made the act successful. What set Roberts off was when a scientist referred to the rocks as trash because they'd been outside of controlled environments and thus contaminated. Being a boy who had been disposed of by his religion and his family for being worthless, Roberts has a unique view on finding value where others do not; this view of the world is what led him to collect things he saw as unwanted. At Utah he stole "trash" fossils from the geology department for the same reason.

Doing a bit of research shows that Mezrich amalgamated several characters and there is a lot of dialog that couldn't possibly be authentic, explaining why this often reads more like a screenplay than a research paper. The gist of the story is accurate, though, and I learned quite a bit about a unique pop culture event—the theft of extraterrestrial material. While Sex on the Moon may be more "based on a true story" than "narrative nonfiction" it is still highly entertaining.

First Sentence:

There was something vaguely menacing about the folders.

Bringing Down the House, by Ben Mezrich

We’ve all heard the story about the M.I.T. blackjack team that took Vegas for millions of dollars, but until I read this I didn’t know many details. Turns out there have been students doing this for decades; when the casinos catch on and ban the kids a new batch is recruited and the cycle begins anew. This book tells of a group that worked the late 1990’s; how they worked the system and why they quit.

The system is pretty simple, actually. Card counting isn’t illegal in Vegas, but a casino can (and will) ask you to leave and not return if they think you are doing it. One of the tell-tale signs of counting is raising bets when the deck is favorable and lowering them when it isn’t. To avoid this, the M.I.T. kids work in groups: spotters and big players. A spotter sits at a table and consistently makes the minimum bet while keeping track of the deck. When the situation becomes unfavorable for the house, the spotter signals the big player (folding his arms or scratching his ear) to join the table. The spotter doesn’t change his play at all, but the big player makes huge bets with a deck tilted strongly in his favor. When the count swings back around to the house, the big player simply gets up and moves on. Simple.

The story here, though, is how the casinos caught on and what happened to the blackjack team. While nothing they did was illegal, the casinos are not very friendly to card counters. Goons were sent to roust people out of their hotel rooms, homes and apartments were broken into and ransacked, and the IRS was encouraged to launch audits. And that was just the Vegas casinos; when the group visited other institutions the welcome was even less hospitable. In the Bahamas, for instance, one player was mugged in the men’s room right in the casino. Fascinating stuff.

First Sentence:

It was ten minutes past three in the morning, and Kevin Lewis looked like he was going to pass out.