Reviews of other people’s books
Alan Jay Zaremba. The Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 228 pages. Sports betting is one of the most popular, yet least studied, forms of gambling. Researchers have been trying to get inside the heads of slot players for years, and there’s been […]
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book reviewsShaun Priest. Decisions. Lakeland, Florida: Small Dogma Publishing, 2008. 233 pages. Often, fiction does a better job of capturing reality than statistics and figures. Sometimes, there are no reliable numbers out there. Sports betting is a perfect example. There are not even solid estimates of the total amount bet illegally on sports each year because,
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book reviewsLauren Goldstein Crowe and Sagra Maceira De Rosen. The Towering World of Jimmy Choo: A Glamorous Story of Power, Profits, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Shoe. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. 215 pages. This is probably not the best book to read after American Rust. The transition from the gritty, downbeat novel to this superficial
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book reviewsPhilipp Meyer. American Rust. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2009. 343. This powerful novel is a case study in character development. Each chapter focuses on a single character. While the narrative remains in the 3rd person, the reader primarily sees the world through that character’s eyes for a few pages. This is an effective technique
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book reviewsScott Hilburn. The Argyle Sweater: A Cartoon Collection. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2009. 128 pages. This is another book I got through the Amazon Vine program, so it has nothing to do with gambling. I just thought it would be a fun read. This cartoon collection from Scott Hilburn is very much in the same
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book reviewsJoshua Gans. Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009. 240 pages. If there are two things that there is no shortage of opinions on, it’s parenting and economics. Yet books about both continue to be popular. So when one combines both topics, it’s of definite interest, at least to parents.
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book reviewsJoseph Helgerson. Crows & Cards. Boston: Houghlin Mifflin, 2009. 352 pages, with notes for further reading and a glossary. I don’t usually read or review books for the 8-12 crowd, but I don’t see many books in that market about ante-bellum riverboat gamblers. That being said, I really enjoyed Crows & Cards. In Zeb Crabtree,
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book reviewsDennis Conrad. Conrad on Casino Marketing. Reno: Raving Consulting Company Press, 2008. 240 pages. Casino marketing is a tricky business. It’s basically sales without a tangible product. There’s not even a warm and fuzzy afterglow most of the time, because the games that casino marketers ask their customers to play are negative expectation. Most people
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book reviewsJohn McPhee. The Pine Barrens. New York: The Noonday Press, 1968. 157 pages. This is a non-fiction classic that, forty years on, still is a brisk and entertaining read. McPhee sketches the geography, history, and people of the Pine Barrens, a surprisingly undeveloped section of the country’s most densely-populated state. McPhee starts with “The Woods
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book reviewsJonathon Keats. The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six. New York: Random House, 2009. 221 pages. Mysticism is a dangerous beast for fiction writers. At its best, writing about mystical ideas can be inspiring, magical. At its worst, it is obscure and inaccessible to non-initiates. So a book inspired by ideas from medieval
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book reviewsBeverly Gage. The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of Wall Street in Its First Age of Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 416 pages. There are many parallels between the terrorist attacks of September 16, 1920, and September 11, 2001. Both were aimed at New York’s financial center, came as the culmination of
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book reviewsVivian Gornick. The Situation and the Story. New Edition for Writers, Teachers, and Students. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. 174 pages. This brief guide to writing personal narrative has several useful insights. Gornick’s biggest and best idea is that good narrative non-fiction must capture both the situation–the factual account of what happened and
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book reviewsDalia Sofer. The Septembers of Shiraz. New York: Ecco, 2007. 340 pages. The Septembers of Shiraz is a powerful novel that shows not only the brutality of an oppressive regime, but personal toll that government exacts, even on those who aren’t imprisoned. The novel begins with the arrest of Issac Amin, a Tehran gem dealer,
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book reviewsCharlie Huston. The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. New York,Ballantine Books, 2009. 319 pages. Wow. That’s my one word review of The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. It’s one of the best, most distinct books I’ve read in a long time. I suppose the most cliched way to describe
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book reviewsA review of Bill Zender’s Casino-ology: The Art of Managing Casino Games.
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book reviewsSeth Davis. When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball. New York: Times Books, 2009. 307 pages. Today, college basketball is big business, with massive TV contracts and incredible hype. During the annual NCAA tournament, college basketball mania reaches its apex with “March Madness.” Every red-blooded American fills out a bracket or ten and
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book reviewsThe Travel Book: A Journey through Every Country in the World. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, 2008. 887 pages. This is a neat book, and an ambitious one. Is it possible to write a travel book that includes entries on every country (and many territories and sub-regions) in the world? Why, yes, it, say the Lonely Planet
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book reviewsLaraine Russo Harper. Legal Tender: True Tales of a Brothel Madam. Las Vegas: Stephens Press, 2008.250 pages. Legal brothel prostitution is a small, enigmatic part of the Nevada experience. “Direct to your room” escorts get all the advertising and notoriety, but prostitution remains illegal in Clark County and therefore Las Vegas. But the legal brothels,
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book reviewsTilar J. Mazzeo. The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It. New York: Collins, 2008. Champagne is an interesting luxury product. Originally, wine-makers were vexed by the bubbles that showed up in some of their bottles after a cold snap. But in the 17th century, a taste for
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book reviewsArne K. Lang. Prize-Fighting: An American History. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2008. 266 pages. In my all-too-brief, but then again way-too-long career in casino security, I always looked forward to fight weekends. Boxing fans, I discovered, were among the most interesting, intelligent, and historically-engaged casino patrons I had the pleasure of meeting. Folks
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book reviews