Uninspiring but sure to receive media attention.
An impulsive young female boxing enthusiast stumbles through the sordid milieu of professional compulsive gambling.
Raymer’s background is certainly improbable. A onetime “private stripper,” she followed up her gaming adventures with a Columbia MFA and a Fulbright Scholarship. She nostalgically recalls her earliest experiences with games of chance alongside her father, a flashy used-car salesman. “Though gambling caused many fights between my mom and dad,” she writes, “I associated it with some of the happiest memories of my childhood.” In Las Vegas, Raymer worked for Dink, an overweight, slovenly “professional sports gambler.” She quickly became enamored with the business and with her own aptitude for the minutiae of receiving odds and placing bets with various sports books. The author found Dink inexplicably fascinating, despite the fact that Dink’s wife considered her a threat, even when Dink abruptly fired her, a loss that caused her to take up boxing. “Dink’s absence and rejection had created a void,” she writes. “Boxing was the most challenging thing I’d ever done. It gave me the discipline I had been craving since I had no professional life to speak of.” Later, Raymer traveled to Curaçao with Bernard, similar to Dink but more compulsive and hysterical. Bernard set up an offshore wagering operation that quickly caromed from instant success to insolvency. Raymer remained unfazed. The author’s prose style is sharp, but her memoir is morally tone deaf. The author strains mightily to present her gambling associates as colorful iconoclasts rather than creeps, yet she seems unable to perceive the financial harm they visit upon peoples’ lives and families. This material might have led to striking literary journalism, but Raymer’s preoccupation with herself—she details several PG-13 romantic affairs, which have little effect on her gambling obsession—renders it trite. The ending leaves various narrative threads unresolved, as Raymer literally runs away from her problems to Rio de Janeiro.
Uninspiring but sure to receive media attention.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52645-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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