An engaging picaresque that explores the role of chance and fate inside the casino and out.
Poker becomes the key to understanding life and history—though not to winning money—in this meditative gambling memoir.
Literary agent and novelist Goodhart (Cards, Kafka and Prague, 2016, etc.) entered Texas Hold ’em tournaments in Prague; Nottingham, England; and the French seaside resort of Deauville, pitting his eternal hopes against repeated, inexorable experiences of failure. Feeling overmatched by the obsessive young men in dark glasses and hoodies who dominate poker tournaments, he fortified himself with magical thinking—he found himself bargaining for divine assistance by offering a percentage of the prize money to charity if he triumphed—and conflicting advice from poker manuals, which had him lurching from his instinctive “tight weak” style of “doing nothing” whenever possible to ill-judged “loose aggressive” betting that occasionally won big pots but inevitably ended with him going bust. The author regales readers with engrossing poker play-by-play rendered in clipped but colorful jargon—“I’m up against Ace, Queen and 7s, way behind, at least until the flop when 10, Jack, 10 gives me a huge lead”—as he tries to figure the odds, suss out opponents’ thinking, and tame his own psychology as he veers between timidity and recklessness. (A glossary and appendix on the rules of Texas Hold ’em should help newbies decipher the goings-on.) He fills in the downtime between hands with beguiling travelogues, snatches of history—he interprets the tragic miscalculations leading to the outbreak of World War I as a kind of botched poker game—and wide-ranging intellectual ruminations. (He imagines a lunchtime meeting between Einstein and Kafka that might bring out their clashing perspectives on the universe as a coherent expression of scientific laws or a tissue of happenstance and enigma.) Goodhart infuses the mechanics of poker hustling with philosophical and literary resonances—“Hansen counsels using my chips, making some moves, stealing a few pots, going for it; Rilke suggests patience and discipline. Never listen to a poet”—in a piquant counterpoint that’s both insightful and entertaining.
An engaging picaresque that explores the role of chance and fate inside the casino and out.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73128-961-2
Page Count: 263
Publisher: The Gate Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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