More workmanlike than thrilling.
Self-professed “professional casino cheater” lets us in on the secrets of his lengthy and successful career.
It all started innocently enough when Marcus, an avid but legit gambler, celebrated his 21st birthday with a massive Vegas spree. Then Lady Luck turned on him, and Marcus found himself sleeping under a bridge. Though he was saved from destitution by a job as a mini-baccarat dealer, the straight and narrow held no appeal, and our man jumped at the chance to join veteran scam artist Joe Classon and his merry band of grifters. After proving his mettle with a scam of his own invention, Marcus went on to learn at the side of the master. The next couple of decades were spent with Classon on an extended tour that looped repeatedly through Vegas, Reno, assorted Indian reservations, riverboats, and much of Europe. (For those who might wonder, the author assures us that although he felt an immediate bond with Classon, he could tell his mentor “wasn’t gay or weird.”) Much of the narrative focuses on the specifics of how the team worked its moves, most of which boil down to lightning-quick sleight-of-hand coupled with specific phrases that cause dealers to doubt their own eyes. Sometimes Marcus would slip high-value chips in winning slots; other times he’d pull off high-value bets before a dealer had time to sweep his chips away. If the author is to be believed, he never got caught, despite some very near misses at the hands of casino detectives. The closest shaves seem to have come at the hands of women, who rarely enter the story unless it is to ultimately betray one of the boys.
More workmanlike than thrilling.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-29139-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
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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