Adam Ruben

PINBALL WIZARDS by Adam Ruben is about the history of pinball told through the eyes of a avid pinball fan coupled the writer's adventures in competitive pinball and his reflecting on why people have been drawn to pinball over the years.
It's clear that Ruben is a pinball fanatic and enjoyed learning about and writing about pinball. He delves into it's beginning, how it was considered a tool of gambling for a long time and banned many places and Ruben carries used through to today. He covers the ups and down in popularity in the latter half of the 20th century and considers that despite the game being minimized almost to extinction several times, it keeps coming back and tries to figure out why that is. He walks the reader through the major players and major events and even recounts his attempts at the biggest pinball tournament in the country. Throughout, Ruben never takes the writing of the book too seriously; through a random funny moment or recognizing a funny play on words that are born out of pinball and therefore the book is all the more endearing and fun to read.
I think everyone has played pinball at least once in their lives, and therefore everyone could enjoyed reading PINBALL WIZARDS. I know that I after reading PINBALL WIZARDS, I want to find the nearest pinball parlor, arcade, or bar with a pinball game and play a few rounds.
Thank you to Chicago Review Press, Adam Ruben, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!… (plus d'informations)

Full disclosure: I know the author of this book. We were both members of the Princeton University Band, an organization that has had a profound impact on me in the six years since I first joined. It is through Adam, and through my relationship with the Band, that I first heard of this book. But I have to be honest and admit that I didn't just buy this book because I know the guy. I bought it because, having just been through a shortened version of grad student hell, I knew exactly what he meant when he characterized going as a "stupid, stupid decision." And the execution of this idea is pretty darn solid.

For starters, serious critique this is not. Ruben is not at all interested in pointing out the explanations or reasons why grad school is awful and why the dynamics of the system need to change. Leave that to the professional sufferers who are in the very positions he mocks herein. Instead, he combines quick one-liners, witty wordplay, and a fresh assortment of his own horror stories to systematically portray the life of an average science grad student (though he doesn't forget the rest of us humanities schmucks, nor does he neglect the MBAs, law students, and med students who took a different but similarly miserable route).

The style of the book is quick, dirty, and packed with little tips and facts, an easily-digestible humor book that is the exact antithesis of the kind of stuff that grad students are expected to read on a daily basis. The text is never overbearing and is always conversational, and the images and graphs that intersperse the pages make it a dynamic as well as entertaining read.

And while Ruben seems most comfortable taking the cheaper shots at the grad student way of life--most of which are funny and accurate, but can eventually feel as if he's taking the easy way out--there are plenty of moments that work on a higher level. The pre-chapter 1 text, for instance, is really quite brilliant, and sets the tone for the work to come. (I'd explain better, but really, it needs to be seen to be understood.)

In the end, the book delivers exactly what you'd expect it to. It's light and fluffy, often amusing and frequently hilarious. The perfect antidote to the life of number-crunching, textual-analyzing sleep deprivation that many of us are all too familiar with and some of us (like myself) had the good sense to run away from headlong.… (plus d'informations)