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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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