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
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
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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