The gambler made into an object of fascination, absolutely dazzling from a distance, increasingly noisome the closer you get.
What began as a ghostwritten autobiography of the most feared tournament player in poker history became a biography by default when Stuey “The Kid” Ungar’s dope habit finally killed him.
He was to the manner born: his father was a bookie and loan shark on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and young Ungar knew all about gambling long before the Lottery and OTB. But he brought something special to his milieu: a natural card sense aided by a fantastic memory and mixed with a risk-taking persona. He was like a gladiator on the green felt, write gambling-journalists Dalla and Alson (Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie, 1996) in this jumpy if dispiriting account. By the time of his bar mitzvah, he was wired in and wired up: “What good was a fucking Treasury bond to me? Was I gonna be able to take that to a dice game? Give me the cash.” His genius was gin, but he made his fortune at poker, where he won the World Series of Poker three times. As mesmerizing as he was at the poker table, however, he was also a rough piece of work (as seen particularly through interview snippets with Dalla, originally his ghostwriter): rude, derisive, a poor winner and a worse loser, a man-child who had been insulated from the mundane tasks of everyday life, incapable of responsibility. The money came and went, won at the card table—and the table action described here is excellent stuff—then lost at the track or ballpark. The fame and the money, the authors suggest, along with Ungar’s loneliness and insecurities, resulted in a severe cocaine habit, so severe it collapsed one side of the nose when passageways had dissolved. Ungar took to crack as an alternative. The story gets more and more awful, until Ungar dies in 1998, at age 45, in a vomit-splattered motel room.
The gambler made into an object of fascination, absolutely dazzling from a distance, increasingly noisome the closer you get.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-7658-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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