by David G. Schwartz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 2006
The thick historical detail may amount to overkill for the average reader, but it's a winning hand for the true student of...
Man's unending thirst for the jackpot, from primitive dice games in early antiquity to the current online poker craze.
Schwartz (Suburban Xanadu, 2003), a Las Vegas resident and gambling scholar, provides a study on gambling's deep-rooted place in history, and compelling proof that gambling comes as naturally to humankind as eating. He also demonstrates that gambling can come in many forms. In 2004, Hong Kong police arrested 115 people after breaking up an insect-fighting ring, seizing nearly 200 fighting crickets. In the Philippines, gamblers can go online to bet on cockfights. In Japan, bettors wager millions on bicycle races at any one of 50 bike tracks. Schwartz guides us through the origins of dice (originally cut from the knuckle bones of animals), playing cards (the modern 52-card deck can be traced to the Italian Renaissance) and the lottery (the first was held in 1444 in Flanders). There are fascinating tidbits on well-known historical figures and their forays into gambling. Galileo and Blaise Pascal made early studies of gambling probability. Voltaire outsmarted the 18th-century French lottery and won nine-million francs. Casanova helped institute the first Italian lottery and got rich operating a lottery sales office. Less lucky were Russian gamblers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the latter of whom, author of the brilliant short novel The Gambler, went broke repeatedly at the German gambling resort in Baden-Baden. Schwartz's tome bogs down when he insists on providing the playing rules for a score of obscure and long-defunct card and dice games, detours that aren't helped by the author's dry, textbook-like prose. Still, the history of gambling has more than enough color to keep readers satisfied, from the gambling saloons of the Wild West to the black-tie baccarat parlors of Monte Carlo to the unlikely evolution of the gilded Las Vegas “mega-casino.”
The thick historical detail may amount to overkill for the average reader, but it's a winning hand for the true student of gambling.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2006
ISBN: 1-592-40208-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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