Semi-Contemporaneous Observations. Beans.

The Most Embarassingly Titled Book that I’ve Kinda Hated in the Past Year

Review of Sex on the Moon, by Ben Mezrich

The jacket copy says that “Sex on the Moon” is a book that “reads like a Hollywood thrill ride.” It does read like something heading for Hollywood. Consider the rainbow of hues that turn up in this book’s short prologue, which describes the breathless getaway from the heist. Driving the Jeep that holds the stolen safe, the con man stops at a traffic light. “Thad’s fingers whitened against the Jeep’s steering wheel as he watched the red glow, willing it to change to green,” Mr. Mezrich writes. The accomplice in the passenger seat is a young woman whose “face was ivory white” and whose “blue eyes were positively glowing with excitement.”

Such wild thrills make Thad think of James Bond. That is one of Mr. Mezrich’s old tricks, and it’s getting older. So is his all-purpose approach to motivation: he suggests that Thad, like the fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg of “The Accidental Billionaires,” was mostly prompted by a desire to be cool and attract hot babes. The women in Mr. Mezrich’s books (which also include such titles as “Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions”) tend to grin a lot and fill out teeny bathing suits in nifty ways.

….

Yet for all his swagger, and after a dozen books, this author is becoming most popular just as he runs out of new ideas. The Thad Roberts of “Sex on the Moon” bears a disappointing resemblance to the Mark Zuckerberg of “The Accidental Billionaires,” thanks to the cookie-cutter way in which Mr. Mezrich has imagined them, and the increasing myopia of his storytelling. Though the artificially enhanced Zuckerberg story had its share of moral ambiguity, “Sex on the Moon” is so full of excuses that it lacks a mitigating quality.

100% correct.  I wish I had read this review before; this book is pretty awful.  Plus, whenever someone asks me what I’m reading, I have to preface it with “I swear it’s not a porny, romance novel.”  Lame.  Save your pesos.  Or buy Robopocalypse.  It’s AWESOME.