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RUNNING THE TABLE

THE LEGEND OF KID DELICIOUS, THE LAST GREAT AMERICAN POOL HUSTLER

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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