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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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