Compelling—if you’re into that sort of thing.
Thriller author Mezrich (Reaper, 1998, etc.) depicts a team of card-counting MIT students who live the Vegas high life for a while before getting caught and barred from all casinos everywhere.
Approached to join the MIT blackjack club, Kevin Lewis was hesitant: Aren’t they nerds who play cards in the library all night long? Still, Kevin is far enough along in his education to know that he’s not cut out for the typical life of an MIT alum, so he decides to check out the club, which he discovers is churning out teams of card counters. (The author suggests that the Techies developed a new system for card counting, but it seems more likely they simply expanded its possibilities.) After passing a series of tests, learning “basic strategy,” and such, Kevin is allowed to join the teams of counters spread throughout a casino so as to raise the chance that someone will find a sufficiently advantageous situation to play in. (Playing alone can take forever.) Soon he’s mastered all the dodges, and before he can say Ocean’s 11 he’s rolling in dough and dating an LA Rams cheerleader. The scam works for a time—it’s legal, actually, so where’s the fun?—but soon enough the casinos seem to be onto them. Faceless authority suddenly assumes the form of Vincent Cole, who may work for a private investigation service specializing in routing out counters. From there it’s mainly a question of how the counters got caught. Did one of their own turn them in, or was it facial recognition software developed at (you guessed it) MIT? Mezrich’s prose is generally colorless, and he unwisely attempts to punch it up with some over-dramatized scenes at the card tables and by using italics wherever he’s talking about a lot of money.
Compelling—if you’re into that sort of thing.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2570-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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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