UDM Libraries Book of the Week

by Ben Mezrich

The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook.

Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women.

Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance–and sexual success–was getting invited to join one of the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order.

Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university’s computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus–and subsequently crashing the university’s servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.

What followed–a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers–makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo’s and Mark’s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart.

The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost–and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.
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by Paul Bodine

‘Great Applications for Business School’ provides a flexible, practical system for enabling business school applicants to find their applications’ central theme, brainstorm their essays’ raw material using personal ‘data-mining’ techniques, craft an outline using theme and evidence sentences, and write, revise, and edit effective essay drafts. Bodine provides detailed strategies for answering the most common MBA admissions essay topics–from goals, accomplishments, and “self-revelation” essays to diversity, leadership and teamwork, failure, and creative or multimedia topics. “Great Applications” includes practical guidelines for understanding what schools actually ask, choosing the appropriate stories for each essay type, and structuring essays so they provide context, analysis, and the all-important takeaways. The foundational material that earned “Great Application Essays for Business School” GMATClub.com’s “Best MBA Book” award in 2010 remains the core of this new edition.

But the second edition–30% larger than the first–also contains substantially new material:
*             Forty-four actual, complete essays or admissions documents (versus 22 in the first edition) written by admitted applicants to the very best business schools (Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Chicago, Tuck, Columbia, London, Kellogg, INSEAD, and MIT Sloan, among others).
*             Treatment of the newest trend in admissions essays: creative, PowerPoint, and multimedia essays.
*             Ten case studies showing how real applicants with specific challenges overcame their admissions obstacles to gain admission to top programs.
*             Five “Put Yourself on the Couch” question sets that will spark the kind of reflection and analysis from which truly self-aware essays can emerge.
*             Extended appendixes on admissions interviews (containing sample interview responses) and wait-list letters (featuring before-and-after versions of two successful letters).

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Peter’s war: a New England slave boy and the American revolution

by Joyce Lee Malcolm

One crazy summer

by Rita William-Garcia

Eleven-year-old Delphine has it together. Even though her mother, Cecile, abandoned her and her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, seven years ago. Even though her father and Big Ma will send them from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to stay with Cecile for the summer. And even though Delphine will have to take care of her sisters, as usual, and learn the truth about the missing pieces of the past.

When the girls arrive in Oakland in the summer of 1968, Cecile wants nothing to do with them. She makes them eat Chinese takeout dinners, forbids them to enter her kitchen, and never explains the strange visitors with Afros and black berets who knock on her door. Rather than spend time with them, Cecile sends Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern to a summer camp sponsored by a revolutionary group, the Black Panthers, where the girls get a radical new education.

Set during one of the most tumultuous years in recent American history, one crazy summer is the heartbreaking, funny tale of three girls in search of the mother who abandoned them—an unforgettable story told by a distinguished author of books for children and teens, Rita Williams-Garcia.

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