Fast-paced and wildly chaotic.
Mezrich (Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History, 2011, etc.) returns with a breakneck retelling of how a bunch of closely knit fraternity brothers built an online poker empire and how fate’s final hand dealt them all a wicked blow.
Before the passing of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, the world of online poker was like the Wild West: virtually lawless and flush with easy cash for those audacious enough to grab it. By bringing the casino table into the American living room, top-grossing sites like PokerStars and PartyPoker were able to rake in massive amounts of money. AbsolutePoker, the site hatched among the frat brothers, was right there with the online poker kings, earning its principals staggering sums of money in an incredibly short period of time. While largely nondescript collegiate types, the characters represent the kind of youthful American archetypes that engenders them with empathy. Before long, the frat boys had successfully established their online outpost in the jungles of Costa Rica and were signing up new subscribers almost faster than they could comprehend. Predictably, they also began driving too fast, drinking too much and sleeping with way too many women. Still, thanks to the author’s mostly adept hand, they essentially remain the same sympathetic dreamers they were before their worlds started to turn increasingly nightmarish. As the author gleefully hurtles the hapless band of entrepreneurs into that final hairpin turn on the highway, readers are left to wince, the RPMs of this rapid-fire narrative running high in the red. The reportage takes on added significance given the fact that the college crew’s final cards have yet to be played.
Fast-paced and wildly chaotic.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-224009-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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