An enjoyable vicarious descent into the world of pool hustling.
Jersey boy’s hardscrabble rise from local pool-hall hustler to tournament pro, in slavish detail.
Dilated from a recent Sports Illustrated article by senior writer Wertheim (Transition Game: How Hoosiers Went Hip-Hop, 2005, etc.), this effusive book profiles young Danny Basavich, an ungainly, overweight boy who, in 1993, dropped out of high school at the age of 15. He descended into a depressive pattern of crying, sleeping and overeating, symptoms of a bipolar disorder that would plague him throughout his life though he largely ignored it. Casual grifting and hanging out at Elite Billiards in Marlboro led to a passion for pool that chased away his blues. Basavich loved Elite’s grubby atmosphere and the faintly menacing hustlers with monikers like Neptune Joe and Mark the Shark. He gained skill and at 17 found his own nom de guerre: Kid Delicious. Playing the sticks at Chicago Billiards, a “hustlers’ finishing school” in West Haven, Ct., he met Bristol Bob, a practiced perfectionist as clean-cut and middle-class as Kid Delicious was scruffy and working-class. Together they took their act on the road, using assorted ruses to lure the locals into games at increasingly higher stakes. Wertheim follows the team’s shenanigans from one unsavory pool hall to another across the country. They were wildly successful for a while, until Bristol became a crystal-meth addict. Delicious went solo, joining such pro tours as Florida’s 2000 USA-Billiards Challenger, which he won. The road action dried up after this newfound fame blew his cover, so he turned pro with reasonable success. Wertheim, an enthusiastic pool fan, offers plenty of nitty-gritty details and notorious characters along the way.
An enjoyable vicarious descent into the world of pool hustling.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-618-66474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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