Gratt’s beginner’s guide to high-stakes poker is chock-full of basic know-how.
Those seeking to emulate the success of poker champions such as Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer are going to need some help. They’re also going to need some time. Fortunately, Gratt has written a guidebook that can cut years off a beginner’s quest—provided his quest is to become the safest player at the table. Gratt claims his guidebook is a “‘read-only-once’ work”; that by following the book’s content to the letter, “a knowledgeable card player can become a successful card-playing professional.” Naturally, caveats such as needing to have “the right stuff” and paying bills from nonpoker sources can raise some doubts. But Gratt’s request that readers send him 2% of their winnings after their initial six months of playing under his rules at least proves the author possesses a certain confidence—or chutzpah. Gratt’s book, which covers everything from card-playing concepts to reading opponents’ tells to 26 practice hands to a glossary of poker terms, is geared solely for no-limit Texas Hold’em cash games played against real opponents, so those seeking an online tip sheet should look elsewhere (though Gratt weighs in on the phenomenon of online poker). After the budding professional antes up the recommended $10,000 to get in the game, Gratt suggests they play only the best hands, and only one every four or five hours at that. Hardly revolutionary strategies, and hardly encouraging words to those looking for real risk, let alone concurrent risk-to-reward ratio. The same goes for Gratt’s fundamentals of patience and bankroll management; they’re so basic that they could cause a former company drone to long for the exciting days of the cubicle. Gratt’s call to play it safe is also a call to play it responsibly; something a dreamy beginner would do well to consider before plunging into what’s undoubtedly a cutthroat business. Yes, the book’s a bit repetitive (Gratt says that’s intentional), and, yes, it removes the bluff (which some insist makes poker what it is), but for those willing to learn the ropes before they jump, this isn’t a bad place to begin. Folks new to the game will find Gratt’s guidebook an accessible, reasonable entry point.
Pub Date: July 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461048183
Page Count: 192
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
