Man Versus Himself: a novel [Paperback]

Erik Keith Benson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 5, 2003

Anselm Betty is on an 89-year winning streak of unparalleled success and fortune. If you asked him, he would tell you that he got to be the CEO of not one, but two, wildly successful companies, as well as the founder of the world's third-best city for singles to live in, by following a few simple guidelines: dressing well, reading the classics, relentlessly innovating, and, in general, by being sincere, honest, and forgiving at all times that is, until Simon, his business partner and best friend, stabs him in the eye and turns all his employees against him.With little time left to live, Anselm is forced to watch a new generation of ambitious entrepreneurs take everything from under his feet. He's not ready to concede defeat just yet, however, and even with his head wrapped in bandages, Anselm manages to fight back, come to terms with his mortality, and ultimately find true love.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Erik Benson lives in Seattle, Washington, where he has been working at small and large Internet companies for five years. He maintains a personal site at erikbenson.com, and a website for this book at manversushimself.net.

Product Details

• Paperback: 148 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse, Inc. (August 5, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0595283535
• ISBN-13: 978-0595283538
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,045,993 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is CEO., November 11, 2003

By 

jim hall (Charlottesville, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Man Versus Himself: a novel (Paperback)

Erik Benson's novel takes you inside the mind of an eccentric inventor of cities, nearing death and becoming increasingly obsessed with not becoming obsolete. As his mental state begins deteriorating the book really becomes hard to put down, and Benson's writing is wildly innovative and interesting. You don't know where he's taking you and you don't know exactly where you've wound up when it's all over. But one thing is sure, that place is creepy. It is like the feeling you get at the end of a David Lynch movie. Something is wrong, but you're not quite sure what it is. It is like the voice of Hal from 2001.
Benson's novel is timely in that it is colored with multiple planned communities, invasive information-gathering technologies, and office power politics. But its core is constructed around more timeless conflicts. When a man defines himself by what he produces, what happens once he becomes unproductive? And as our memory fails us, what remains of our identity? As death nears and our bodies deteriorate, what recourse do we have? Can we impose our identity on someone or something else? Will we resort to nonsense or destruction? Or can we find some synthesis with everything outside of ourselves and slip away quietly and peaceably?
Ultimately, Benson's first novel is a lyrical and fast-moving story that examines both group social behavior, the future of technology, and the most personal internal conflicts of man. It definitely holds up to multiple readings, which is my mark of a great book.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What goes through Erik's mind?, October 22, 2003

By 

Jana Kleitsch (Seahurst, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Man Versus Himself: a novel (Paperback)

What if Erik was an 89 year old CEO? What if Erik lived in a city he created? This book gives insight into the wonderful imagination of Erik. He's a great story teller, although I had to skip over some of the computational subplots as I prefer more mindless reading. I've tried to convince Erik he needs to change the ending. Maybe I could pay some money for my own ending that could be posted on the http://manversushimself.net/ website because upon finishing the book I had to huck it across the room (like I did with some of my other favorite, emotion-inducing books). Read it to see for yourself.

11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Self-acclaimed self-published author reviews his own book!, September 5, 2003

By 

Buster Benson "In it to win it." (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Man Versus Himself: a novel (Paperback)

Man Versus Himself is a first person account of an extremely successful business man, named Anselm Betty, as he faces the end of his career and the disintegration of everything he has worked to build over the course of his 89 years. I'm fascinated with the concept of losing everything, and this book was my attempt at seeing what I could pull out of that universal dilemma.

I wrote it in 24 consecutive days during the month of November, 2002. It's heavy on project management philosophy and office politics, as those were the biggest things on my mind coming into the project. I became obsessed with the idea of justifying your life in the same terms and with the same vocabulary that companies justify projects. Business case formulas are so clean and the analyses are built to measure value, so it was a natural fit to solve the problem of doing something of value with your life. Anselm is a blend of many strong CEO types that have become legendary over the last 5 years; he is the child of literature, the media, and the entrepreneurial spirit.

I plan on having as much fun with this process as possible, doing some text manipulation with the manuscript (see manversushimself.net for some stuff like charting sentence length per chapter and building Markov chains), and experimenting with various ways of promoting the book through the weblog community and this website's numerous list-making and review-promoting features. If it all flops, oh well, I won't be too heart-broken.