Despite an occasional overload of detail, this is a provocative look at the world of games and the way the mind works with...
From Wall Street Journal sports reporter and NPR commentator Fatsis (Wild and Outside, 1998), a comprehensive guide to the world of competitive Scrabble.
Fatsis used to play a pretty mean game of Scrabble—or so he thought, until he began investigating the game for an article and found himself becoming nearly as obsessed as the hard-core players he interviewed: G.I. (as in gastrointestinal) Joel Sherman, the pill-popping comedian Matt Graham, and Marlon Hill, an ardent young black nationalist. They all spent their lives learning new words and playing in tournaments to win the prizes that were their only income. Some loved words for themselves, others merely as means to an ends—and Fatsis advises anyone thinking of playing competitive Scrabble to face the reality “that the game requires learning words that may not have any outside utility.” Ultimately, competitive Scrabble is “about mastering the rules of the game, and the words are the rules.” The author takes lessons from the champions, plays at competitions, and learns about bingos (using all seven tiles at once), alphagrams (rearranging the letters of words in alphabetical order), and coffeehousing (unnerving your competitor by talking during a tournament). While working on improving his ratings as he competes from Manhattan to Reno, he also researches the history of the game. Invented by an unemployed architect named Alfred Butts during the Depression, Scrabble did not catch on until the 1950s, when increased leisure led to sales of over three million sets in the US and abroad. Competitive Scrabble, Fatsis concludes, attracted him because it allowed him to deal with old issues straight off a therapist’s couch (i.e., control, order, power), as well as giving him a new way to meet friends, pass time, and make a name for himself (i.e., a hobby).
Despite an occasional overload of detail, this is a provocative look at the world of games and the way the mind works with words.Pub Date: July 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-01584-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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
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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