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
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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