A satisfying, useful overview—given poker’s popularity, this is sure to be a prominent book this holiday season.
The epic story of how poker has grown from disreputable roots to become America’s—and the world’s—game.
Poker journalist McManus follows up his bestselling memoir Positively Fifth Street (2003) with a comprehensively structured history of the game. He argues that the complexities of poker lend a uniquely intricate American metaphor for many aspects of society, from the codes of the antebellum South to the frontiers of Artificial Intelligence. Fittingly, he begins by observing that the leader of the free world prides himself on being “a pretty good poker player.” In fact, President Obama is the latest in a long line of presidents who “have used the card game to relax with friends, extend their network of colleagues, or even deploy its tactics and psychology in their role as commander in chief.” This line of discussion is typical of McManus’s arguments for poker’s metaphorical or talismanic status in society—essentially, that a majority of powerful, driven people have incorporated it into their lives. The author first explains how the game gradually evolved—often covertly—in multiple cultures over hundreds of years. It was first known as poque and “pokuh,” and came into its own on the Mississippi steamboats of the early 19th century, among soldiers in the Civil War and on Western ranches. McManus also highlights some fascinating classic cheating methods, surely for entertainment purposes only—especially since these techniques would require more skill to pull off than honest play. The game’s outlaw status began to fade around the turn of the 20th century (Theodore Roosevelt was one high-profile fan), the author writes, and he alternates discussions of cultural phenomena in which poker plays a part with explorations of how the game became less crooked and more streamlined and difficult. This resulted in the development of the now-famous World Series of Poker. These suspenseful chapters on contemporary poker play—McManus asserts mathematical professionalism has replaced the “sharps” of old—may be difficult for neophytes to follow, but the author provides a helpful glossary.
A satisfying, useful overview—given poker’s popularity, this is sure to be a prominent book this holiday season.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-29924-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
