His book sometimes too detailed for its own good, Blecha gets the allure of the game and the characters populating its...
The end-all, be-all history of the World Series of Poker, whether you like it or not.
Once confined to bachelors’ apartments, men’s clubs and dingy backrooms, poker is now, with all the websites and cable shows reveling in its alternately dull and dramatic minutiae, as popular as the Las Vegas Strip itself. The Series began in 1970 as a publicity stunt: Nick “The Greek” Dandalos, who had supposedly broken every East Coast roller, including 1919 World Series fixer Arnold Rothstein, got Horseshoe owner Benny Binion to host a poker game with the highest stakes in history. From then on, year after year, the Horseshoe was home to an annual gathering of poker’s dark stars, the eccentric natures of whom provide most of what is worthwhile in Grotenstein and Reback’s intermittently entertaining book. Best of the lot is Amarillo Slim, whose prodigious talent was matched only by his outfits and habit of taking absolutely any kind of bet (he once bet $37,500 that a fly would land on a particular sugar cube), and was the inspiration for Kenny Rogers’s song “The Gambler.” Binion himself made for a good story, too: A Texas roughneck, he killed two men before being run out of the state by a sheriff who couldn’t be bribed. Though they keep card-play analysis to a minimum, the authors’ recording of each year’s tournament may prove less than thrilling to the non-obsessed. As the years pile up, the Series grows bigger, ESPN starts broadcasting it and the tables of shady old pros start getting replaced by young suburban kids who learned to play online. As of 2006, the whole operation is being moved to the Rio, just off the Strip.
His book sometimes too detailed for its own good, Blecha gets the allure of the game and the characters populating its darker fringes.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-34835-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of...
Everything you ever wanted to know about America’s favorite Mafia serial—and then some.
New York magazine TV critic Seitz (Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, 2015, etc.) and Rolling Stone TV critic Sepinwall (Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion, 2017, etc.) gather a decade’s worth of their smart, lively writing about New Jersey’s most infamous crime family. As they note, The Sopranos was first shot in 1997, helmed by master storyteller David Chase, of Northern Exposure and Rockford Files renown, who unveiled his creation at an odd time in which Robert De Niro had just appeared in a film about a Mafioso in therapy. The pilot was “a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, and crime thriller, with dabs of ’70s American New Wave grit. It is high and low art, vulgar and sophisticated.” It barely hinted at what was to come, a classic of darkness and cynicism starring James Gandolfini, an actor “obscure enough that, coupled with the titanic force of his performance, it was easy to view him as always having been Tony Soprano.” Put Gandolfini together with one of the best ensembles and writing crews ever assembled, and it’s small wonder that the show is still remembered, discussed, and considered a classic. Seitz and Sepinwall occasionally go too Freudian (“Tony is a human turd, shat out by a mother who treats her son like shit”), though sometimes to apposite effect: Readers aren’t likely to look at an egg the same way ever again. The authors’ interviews with Chase are endlessly illuminating, though we still won’t ever know what really happened to the Soprano family on that fateful evening in 2007. “It’s not something you just watch,” they write. “It’s something you grapple with, accept, resist, accept again, resist again, then resolve to live with”—which, they add, is “absolutely in character for this show.”
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of them.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3494-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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