By turns amusing and alarming.
An industry insider dissects the dire social consequences of America’s gaming culture.
Ugel worked in a particularly unsavory corner of the lottery business, a private, lump-sum company that offers winners a quick hit of cash if they sign over their annuities. As he points out, these are hardly the only sharks in the gambling ocean. Lotteries date to antiquity, and our founding fathers were all heavily involved in their implementation or promotion. Today, gambling is more pervasive and more acceptable than ever. More than half of all American adults play at least once a year, and teens think gambling for high stakes is perfectly normal. Canny lottery executives regularly introduce new, zippier and more addictive games. PR departments know that citizens like to hear about lotto proceeds going to state education, but the author reminds us that lottery money doesn’t increase a state’s actual expenditures on schools; it just allows legislatures to appropriate a smaller portion of the state budget to the three Rs. As for actually getting lucky and winning, his text backs up the old saw about folks being happier before they won. The newly rich are pursued by friends, relatives and sharp businesspeople out to take advantage of them. For many, lottery wins lead to lawsuits. One woman’s septuagenarian husband filed for divorce as soon as she hit the jackpot, successfully claiming he should get half the money, since she’d used his $20 to buy the ticket. A breezy, funny writer, Ugel made “multiple six figures” during his days in the industry, but most of it is now gone: “It’s as if I never had the money in the first place. I’m as jealous as you are.” He’s also pessimistic, short on suggestions of how Americans might challenge the lottery industry. Maybe this eye-opening book will galvanize a movement.
By turns amusing and alarming.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-128417-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Collins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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