Readers need not be professional gamblers to enjoy these tales, which ridicule the pastime with great affection.
Wilde debuts with a collection of gambling-related satirical pieces populated by characters who take risks in casinos and in life.
The author knows a good deal about casinos and their patrons, and his book’s first chapter examines the quirks of online gambling. In it, Wilde’s gambler friend Melvin gets a nice haul on the internet that he plans on taking to Las Vegas, but he later realizes that he may actually prefer the virtual gaming. Other pieces poke fun at internet reliance: Wilde’s job at the website Gambling City, for example, entails meeting the staff, including a programmer who speaks only in the computer languages COBOL and BASIC. The author also lampoons how some online casinos avoid paying out winnings by claiming that an internal audit is prohibiting payment or by simply declaring bankruptcy. Later chapters target brick-and-mortar casinos and other forms of gambling. The short, fun opening pieces feature real-life people (including the author himself and the occasional U.S. president) intermingling with caricatures (such as a lawyer named Arthur Ripoff). A few recurring figures add to the enjoyment, such as customer-service representative Kathy, who’s looking for love through customer correspondence; ex–hit man Big Tony at Gambling City; and U.S. Sen. Jon Killjoy, whose determination to ban online gambling makes him the collection’s villain. Wilde also offers parodies of Shakespeare plays, movies, and TV shows while still maintaining his overall theme; in one, the management of the MGM Grand wants to hire the A-Team. The book ends with a series of conventional but entertaining short stories. In “Police, Poker, and Panties,” for instance, an Alabama cop plays poker in order to help her solve a string of armed robberies. The easygoing prose is primarily taken up with dialogue, typically Wilde’s. Some jokes, however, become repetitive, such as when casinos habitually declare customers “bonus abusers.” One tale about the author taking a trip to McDonald’s is humorous but predictable: Wilde has a coupon for a free Big Mac, but a restaurant employee tries his hardest not to give him the burger.
Readers need not be professional gamblers to enjoy these tales, which ridicule the pastime with great affection.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5455-9297-7
Page Count: 522
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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