Bringing Down the House (or Time off for Bad Behavior)

My quest to read something worthwhile has finally taken a positive turn. I just finished breezing through “Bringing Down the House“, by Ben Mezrich (subtititled “The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions”).

While a New York Times Bestseller, this is not the type of nonfiction book that wins awards. Nothing groundbreaking, no new theories, no answers to life’s problems. Unless, of course, you think learning how team card-counting can make you rich is an answer to life’s problems.

While the story is told in the third person by our narrator, it follows one character, Kevin Lewis, an M.I.T. student/math whiz, who is brought into the circle of Micky Rosa, a former M.I.T. professor who abandoned academia long ago to focus on blackjack. What Micky does is recruit smart kids from M.I.T. to participate on “teams” to play blackjack with investors’ money. The team members are taught all sorts of tricks about card counting, some of which I still find hard to believe can actually be done. Generally speaking, card counting in a casino is not something that can work for you long term, because it’s too easy for the casino employees to spot someone who’s counting cards (based on the way they vary their bets, etc.). What Micky’s teams learn is how to beat the casinos by working as teams, each member of which plays a specific role. Some people are “spotters”, and simply grind away at tables, consistently making minimum bets while discreetly counting cards. When a positive count comes around, they signal the “Big Player”, who comes to the table and starts making big bets. Fairly simple in theory, but very difficult to pull off in real life. Takes a lot of acting skill, and nerves of steel.

As I said in the intro, there’s nothing groundbreaking about Mezrich’s writing style, but the content here — the story of how these teams came into being and operated — is fascinating. And supposedly true. Anyone with any interest in gambling will find this an enjoyable read.

Also, anyone out there who’s good at math, has a lot of free time, likes to travel, and has a lot of money, please feel free to give me a call. I have an idea.

Time Off For Good Behavior

I’m not going to post much about this “self-help” book which would only be appealing to my fellow Type-A female members of our blog (and upon reflection we are all intense, type A overachievers) but let’s just say if you are looking for some support to “get out of the rat race” – this book does it.

Mary Lou Quinlan was CEO of the largest ad agency and one day packed it all in and founded her own marketing company and now leads a much happier, fulfilling life. In this book – she interviews about 40 extremely successful women who have all made the change out of their stressful, corporate, high paying jobs to something much more rewarding and balanced. If you can relate to having the good girl DNA which is defined by the “combination of the urge to win and achieve with the desire to please and do the right thing” (sound familiar – anyone) then you will definitely relate to this book. If you want to make a change in your professional life – head toAmazon right now.

Stacked: Week 3

Dang. Missed it tonight. Late flight home. Back next week with an update.

Blink

Don’t read this post. Okay — you had limited information, but were able to make the correct decision. What? You haven’t made up your mind yet? Hmmmm. I thought I’d help you learn some of the amazing, insightful tidbits you might accidentally get from reading “Blink”, by Malcolm Gladwell.

I really don’t know what to say about this book except (i) I read the introduction and was fascinated by the way the “adaptive unconscious” seems to be able to make decisions without the conscious brain really knowing why, and (ii) even the conscious brain can get suckered into reading way more than it needs to by a sexy introduction. Honestly.

The introduction to this book made me pay for it, and then I started reading it. And I thought: let’s go back to that introduction part — it was interesting. Don’t waste your time. If this were a graduate paper, it wouldn’t pass. This guy can’t stay focused and stay on his subject long enough to keep your average, professional, undiagnosed A.D.D. patient interested. By the time I got 150 pages into it, I had no idea why I even started it. I only finished about two-thirds of the book, but I had to give up. If any of you have the guts and the patience, maybe you can finish it and explain how it all gets tied together and makes sense at the end. Meanwhile, I’ve got “How I Paid for College”, “The Egyptologist”, “You Remind Me of Me”, “Bringing Down the House”, “Atlas Shrugged”, and “Magical Thinking” here in my possession and waiting to be read. I’ll catch up again when I’ve got news. Love you all. Seriously. I do.

Congrats to Dr J

There is a new l’il Dr J. He was born 2:30 this afternoon. He’s an 8-pounder. Mother and baby are both fine. He is currently without a name. Help the parents out by suggesting one. I’m going with Augusten Benedict.

The Chabon Flap

Or is it a fracas? A hub-bub? A dust up? Anyway, as I mentioned last week, Bookforum has an article that suggests that Michael Chabon, a blog favorite, fabricated a story about the Holocaust, possibly with the intent to deceive his audience. The lectures were sponsored by Nextbook, a Jewish cultural organization. This week, Nextbook responds, suggesting that the author of the Bookforum article largely missed the point. The title of the lecture was “Golems I have Known” in which Chabon states “Golems are real” and describes his encounters with them. At any rate, Nextbook includes a complete audio file of the lecture. If you listen, the audience seems to me to be in on the “performance”. Chabon gives many literary-style clues that he may be an unreliable narrator. That’s my take. Listen for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

In seperate, yet somehow related news, there is apparently a Hasidic reggae star. No, really.

Stacked: Week 2

It’s official: despite some obvious flaws, I am a fan of Stacked. If they could tone down the laugh track and the DJ-voiced brother, it would only help. Anyway, Skyler arrived at the bookstore drunk for her first day on the job and is summarily fired. What? How can that be? Don’t worry, Skyler un-fires herself. Then, through grit, determination, and sassy smarts, Skyler beats out that guy from Arrested Development for the position. Go Skyler! Books with prominent posters visible in last night’s episode, include: The Known World, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Cirle Award (one of us should read this), and Hand Made Modern, which did not.

The Turkish Gambit

I’ve just finished The Turkish Gambit by Boris Akunin. Akunin is a Russian author who is HUGE in the former-Soviet book scene, at least according to his stateside P.R. This is the third book in the Erast Fandorin Series.

The series is very Russian. To get a quick visual feel for just how Russian, check out the author’s web site. Holy crap, that’s Russian. I have no idea what’s going on at that site, but it’s fun to click blindly around. Anyway, on to the book…

Let me ctach you up if you are not familiar with the series. The books take place in Czarist Russia, under the rule of Alexander II. In the first book, The Winter Queen, young Erast Fandorin becomes a police detective. He learns the latest in modern police methods from his mentor, falls in love, and helps to solve a mysterious crime. The story is beautifully written, a cross between a crime novel and Anna Karenina. It ends tragically, as required by the Russian Literature Statutes.

The second book, Murder on the Leviathan, is a more straightforward mystery. Fandorin, hangs quietly in the background through most of the book, waiting until the end to give the lengthy whodunit speech.

After reading the first two books, I ordered The Turkish Gambit from Amazon months before it came out. Needless to say, I had forgotten all about it when it showed up unannounced one day. What I liked about the series so far, especially the first book, was that the books are reminiscent of and written in the style of classic Russian Literature. Except they are well under 1200 pages. So if you have a hankering for Russian literature without all that epic majesty and what not, this series is a good fix.

This time around, Erast finds himself reluctantly pulled into a war between Russia and Turkey. The story revolves around the political intriques and double-crossing going on down at the front. Erast is assigned to the military intelligence appartus to figure out who is undermining the Russian military tactics. Really, the story, more so in this book than the others, is largely beside the point. The story here seems to serve the writing style, the political commentary on the future of Russia, the role of women in Russia, and just the whole czarist Russian milieu in general. Plus it helps mark Fandorin’s steady rise in Russian society.

This is the third book to be translated from what is now an eleven book series in Russian. I’ll buy the next one, no question. However, I would not recommend starting the series with this book. It’s not the best in the series. I also don’t think that this book will reward newcomers, as you are expected to know about things that have happened in the previous books.

Say What You Will…

My first exporsure to the book Citizen Vince, reviewed favorably in this weekend’s New York Times, was the huge poster on the wall of the book store in Stacked. Books and boob jokes: someone, somewhere, is a genius. (If you need a registration to view the NYT review, you may want to visit the site bugmenot.com. The two things, of course are completely unrelated.)

Protest Signs

See Protest Signs of the Religious Right at the Drink at Work Blog. Seriously, how great is that name?

Not the Dali painting………the book

Persistence of Memory by Tony Eprile was one of the more interesting books I’ve read in a while. Tony Eprile is a South African writer and the story takes place in the “gilded cages” of the Jewish community in Johannesburg.

The story is divided into 3 sections: the childhood of the main character, Paul Sweetbread; his service in the army during the secret wars in Angola and Namibia; and his testimony in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee about the war atrocities. Paul is an overweight, food obsessed, sensitive boy, who has an unusual condition of a photographic memory (it’s more than photographic – for example – if he meets someone – he will even remember the stitching of the buttons on the shirt) . Paul spends his entire life as an underdog but I found him to be a sympathetic and strong character because he manages to navigate life without a support system.

Woven throughout the book is the central theme of how upper-middle class whites in South Africa acted as if apartheid did not even exist. They literally built “fortresses” around their homes and tried to pretend that the squalid lives of their fellow black countrymen did/does not even exist. Eprile manages to hit home with this theme in a non-judgmental, matter of fact way. Rather he uses Paul’s thoughts and actions to demonstrate the complexities of the situation and uses his character development as the means to show how things can change in South Africa.

Another reason that I enjoyed this book was because it was on a subject that I know little to nothing about. The writing was intelligent, witty and humorous and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to read something different for a change.

Stacked

Attention book lovers: Don’t forget to catch Stacked on Fox at 8:30 EST.

My Life Among the Serial Killers

After a couple of disappointing forays into the world of fiction, I decided to pull this one out of the pile of candidates for my next reading adventure. Sounded pretty sexy to me. Alas, though, my losing streak continues. Believe it or not, this book was actually BORING.

The book, written by “Dr.” Helen Morrison, a forensic psychiatrist, purports to provide her insights from the more than eighty serial murderers she’s interviewed over the years, including famous guys like John Wayne Gacy. Unfortunately, I learned absolutely nothing from this book, other than that it was apparently a struggle for an attractive young female doctor to get respect from prison guards in the 1970’s. Oh, and Dr. Morrison got married to a hot neurosurgeon. Oh, and did I mention that she claims to have been attractive in the 1970’s?

Morrison’s findings represent a great example of the difference between “issue spotting” and “problem solving”. She seems to have no problem pointing out (without any demonstrative proof to back it up) shortfalls in others’ theories about what makes a serial killer tick (e.g., she dismisses abusive parents and physical trauma as causes). But she fails to notice that she has nothing to support her eventual conclusions, which aren’t really laid out for the reader until the epilogue. She thinks that there’s a serial killer gene, and that a person either is or isn’t a serial killer from the moment of conception. Uhm, thanks, doc. I guess that solves it.

As you can probably tell, I found this author arrogant and not very credible. It also doesn’t help her case that she seems to think that serial killers are in some way less deserving of punishment than your standard mass murderer, because mass murderers and psychopaths can actually be treated, whereas serial killers are essentially “hardwired” to be serial killers and so we shouldn’t blame them for their untreatable illness.

The Sin Eater

I read The Sin Eater by Alice Thomas Ellis over a long weekend at the beach. Spring Break 05! Wooooo!

I got this book for $0.59 from Amazon. (Ever notice there’s no “cents” key? What’s up with that?) I’ve decided that the new standard that all books must meet for a trip to the beach is that they cost less than $1. I have no idea how this book made it into my “to read” list to begin with other than a vague recollection of some online article that I read somewhere that one time. Anyway, I had it, and it was cheap. So off to the beach it went.

The book was originally written in 1977, meaning that it pre-dates The Dukes of Hazzard by two years if you need some historical perspective. So it might be a litle dated. The story is about a Welsh family that are meeting at their ancestral manse. The family patriarch is on his death bed and absent from most of the action. The gather in death’s grip appears to symbolize several institutions whose glory is perceived as fading. The rigid English class structure is beginning to decline, and nationalism is up among British subject states like Wales and Ireland. In one scene, the barbarians (the common people – sniff) are almost literally at the gates.

The end is all but nigh for the Roman Catholic Church as well. The book came relatively soon after reforms recommended by Vatican II began to be implemented, and the changes do not sit well with one of the main characters. Rose has what is apparently a semi-famous tirade against the Church. InterestinglyEllis herself was in training to become a nun after converting at the age of 19. She went on to become a become a “tradionalist” critic of the Church, writing for a Catholic publication until she was fired for – wait for it – criticizing the Church.

Like virtually all semi-comic British novels, arch comments and witty rejoinders drive most of the action. All hat – no horse. There is infidelity, jealousy, and inter-class homesexuality. Naturally, slights, both perceived and real, build with tragic consequences.

The cast is large, and figuring out the relationships takes time and patience. It’s not a long book, and teh type is large. Perfect if you are squinting in the sun. Bottom line: read it if you have $0.59, and you are headed to the beach.

You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free

It was slow going finishing (Booker Prize winning) James Kelman’s You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free.

I picked up this book after being intrigued by various reviews. In fact, I was so intrigued by reviews of this book that I accidentally purchased it twice. I gave my other copy to Dr J, which I may need to apoligize for later. It turns out that the reviews that I read only alluded to part of the story – the interesting parts. The book left me unsettled but thinking a lot about what was really going on. Quite honestly, I haven’t reached a firm opinion on it yet. A long read of indeterminate enjoyment deserves a long post. You’ve been warned…

This is the story: Jeremiah is a Scottish immigrant who has lived in the U.S. of A. for 12 years, and it is the day before he’s catching a flight to Scotland to visit his family. We find out that Jeremiah has traveled all over the country. He has an ex-wife (sorta) and a little girl. He has had a variety of jobs; none of them have been very fulfilling. His life has been a mess, he is filled with regret, and he more or less feels that he is returning home a failure. He spends his last night in America drinking in a small town and looking back on it all. The book is told from inside Jeremiah’s head, and narrative threads begin and end as they pop in and out of his thoughts. Since we are in his thoughts, the story is written in a Scottish “accent”. Here’s a sample from the beginning of the book:

…I was sick of myself and scunnered with my company, physically and mentally.
And why was I gaun hame! I didnay want to go hame. Yes I did…No I fucking
didnay. It was an obligation…Once I am deid the descendants will be discussing
departed ancestors: Who was that old shite that lived in the states? Which one?
Him that didnay come home to visit his poor auld maw! Aw that bastard!
This
is the obligation that I am talking about.

I have read a few Irvine Welsh books (Trainspotting, etc, which really take the Scottish vernacular to the next level), so I was OK with the Scottish. However, the story took some wee turns I wasnay fuckin ready for. That’s for sure.

The story that I didnay know I was getting is a paranoid fantasy (that’s what I’m calling it) that takes up much of the middle of the book. Jeremiah is certainly paranoid. Whenever he walks into a bar, he is sure that the regular Joe’s that look his way are all “pentagon fuckers” who are all bent on reporting him to some central authority that weeds out the “alien furnir bastard” types. In this parallel universe (or world of paranoid delusions) public facilities all have a blue sign on the wall that inform patrons that all suspected foreign-born persons will be required to supply their official documentation on demand. Jeremiah holds a “Red Card, Class III”, which is (as far as I know) a fictional lowest available alien status. Much of the discussion here is about Jeremiah looking to upgrade his alien status through various schemes and to avoid making the slip that may endanger his legal status in the country. For example, Jeremiah is afraid of the upcoming renewal of his driver’s license, because it will open him up to the direct scrutiny of a fickle bureaucracy.

Where the story gets strange is in the particulars of the bizarre security apparatus related to air travel. The September 11th terrorist attacks do not appear to have occured, or are not mentioned. The increased security at airports begins because of what is called the “persian bet”. I am not sure that I followed the particulars very well, but essentially the persian bet entails taking out an insurance policy for air travel, which in this book is apparently a more uncertain proposition than it is in the real world. The policies become a lottery ticket that if you win (you’re dead or seriously injured) and your family receives the jackpot. A huge industry evolves around the particulars of the various bets, etc. Lots of desperate characters begin to hang out at the airports participating in sub-lotteries just to win tickets to board a plane. Dubious detention centers begin to spring up at the airports as well. Jeremiah improbably gets a job as a security operative who is in charge of controlling the throngs of the desperate poor who are making the airport parking lots their home. His management structure seeks new and inventive ways to handle the poor, who are now making air travel unseemly. Jeremiah notes:

The legal team entered discussions with the politicans to discover or create a
ruling based on the nature of patriotism, whether it might be unlawful to bring
shame on the Uhmerican people. Surely the flaunting of one’s poverty in public
by tiny minorities caused undue suffering and stress t the vast majority of
folks who didnay have poverty, and was not inly socially unacceptable
but a breach of civil rights?

There’s lots in that vein about the myopia of the powerful. Kelman also targets some of the Orwellian doublespeak that has crept into politics:

These right-wing fascist think tanks were lcoated on campuses all over Uhmerica
disguised as centres of intellectual integrity, and it wouldnay have surprised
me if the Benefit Nigt was being organized to fund a new Weapons of Peace
Initiative.

Doubleplusgood, eh? I like a jab at right-wing fascists as much as the next guy. That got me thinking about the langauge being used in politics these days. Things are phrased in ways that limits the opposition that can be mounted against it. For example, let’s say you wanted to sponsor a bill that eliminates funding for school lunches for poor children. All you need to do is call it the The Every Child Gets a Nutrioinal Lunch Act. Who’s going to go on record opposing that? Anyway, I digress.

Our man Jeremiah is certainly yet another in a long line or unreliable narrators. He is drinking throughout most of the story, he may be delusional, and he throws out lines like, “Real life is reality. No necessarily. It is a debatable point…ma brains is twisted sir.” Alrighty then. After 400+ pages inside of Jeremiah’s head, it is a relief to finally get out.

Jeremiah does give some insight into what it might be like to be a post 9/11 immigrant, even if you’re a “pink alien furnir bastard” (it may be worse if you’re nay pink). The Americans that he speaks with, on the whole, are unsure of where exactly Scotland is. They ask him questions like “do you have e-mail in Scotland?”. One bright fella assumes that Jeremiah is sympathetic to his cause thinking that since Jeremiah is a member of a clan, then he must also be down with The Klan. Right?

The book raises other questions that are worth thinking about. The “big” question in this book with the paranoid fantasies, security forces, detentions, etc. is about the nature of freedom in the “land of the free”. Kelman is Scottish, so, you know, if he doesn’t like it he can lump it.

My feeling re: this book is that the persian bet/paranoia ramble in the middle may have been overplayed. We get it. The themes of the book could still have been addressed, more than adequately, by what was otherwise a straightforward and compelling story about a down on his heels immigrant who wasnay so bad as all that. And it was an an interesting narrative style, when all is said and done.

[Note to Dr J who received my extra copy of this book as a “prize”: I’d love for someone else to read this and get into a beer soaked discussion about it, say at the Flat Iron over burgers, but that is a tall order to ask. It would also be entirely reasonable and within rights to sell it off at a local used book shop and pocket the cash. If you want to go that route, teh Jake’s on Highland now buys books, and you can convert the book imeadiately into ice cream.]

Cool Stuff – Fresh from the Docks

I was just checking out Bookslut. Occasionally they do this cool thing where they have someone illustrate (i.e., make a comic of) an author’s lecture. This month’s is pretty cool, and it features a conversation between Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex) and Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante’s Handbook).

There was a link at Bookslut to a story at Bookforum about Michael Chabon inventing a weird personal tale about the Holocaust while speaking to Jewish groups.

Speaking of Jewish groups, both of the programs that the above were based upon were presented by Nextbook, “a gateway to Jewish literature, culture & ideas.”

After checking all that out, I went to see Sin City. Back at Bookslut, there is an in depth discussion re: the movie and the graphic novels (comics) on which they were based. By women.

Life is a circle.

Hats Off

To the champeen UNC Tarheels, and especially to Ol’ Goshdurn Roy Williams. That what seemed like the entire weight of the national sports media tried to frame this as a “Team vs. Talent” matchup (with the Heels in the black hats) made the victory all the sweeter. Roy shoved it up their dickhole, as we used to say on the pony league fields. You go, Roy. We’re proud of you. You’ve earned it. Now go out there and prostitute yourself and your program for major corporations like someone else we could name if we weren’t so Magnanimous in Victory.

Dreams from My Father

I just finished Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama. I was traveling last week, and I forgot the book that would not be finished. So I read this instead.

Having decided that I was ready to begin taking my first baby steps towards re-joining the national political debate, it seemed like a good idea to start with an eye towards the future. Senator Obama was a highlight of the ‘04 Democratic Convention, and he appears to be a rising star of the party. So I decided to find out more about him by picking up his book.

I was surprised to find out that Sen. Obama wrote this book over 10 years ago, well before his rise on the national political scene. As part of this book deal, he was asked to take a year off after graduation from law school to write about his life and his experiences that led to his becoming the first black editor for the Harvard Law Review. The Senator notes in his new introduction to the book that there are certainly parts of the book that he might consider impolitic. He might be thinking of the part where he acknowledges that as a teen looking for a high, he and his friends would do blow when we could afford it. Ooops.

There are no red state/blue state diatribes. There are no Democrats are better than Republicans essays. There are no lengthy descriptions about why Barack’s tiger style Christianity will defeat W’s dragon style church going. Also: there’s no bragging in this book about what a great man the author is. It’s just the story of one man’s life, warts and all.

The Senator has certainly had an interesting life. His mother, a white woman from Kansas, and his father, a black man from Kenya, met at the University of Hawaii, where he was born. He lived in Indonesia for a time when his mother re-married, returned to Hawaii for school, and went to college at Occidental & Columbia. He then gave up a nice paying finance bob in NYC to move to Chicago to become a community organizer. What that meant in basic terms is that he went to the scariest projects in Chicago’s south side and got involved in peoples’ lives. Later he goes to Kenya to re-establish ties with his father’s family, who were largely unknown to him. The part about going to Harvard is a few pages, and being editor of the Law Review there is not even mentioned in the original text.

The book talks a great deal about racial identity. The idea of having a foot in both the black world and the white world, while not necessarily belonging to either, is a large theme is this book. Having a foot in modern America as well as tribal Africa is also discussed. Growing up without a father present also had a large impact on Sen. Obama. Sen. Obama spends a lot more time trying to figure the complexity of his identity and his purpose in the world than most of us. And with good results.

I am waiting for the next book from Sen. Obama. Hopefully it will contain a lengthy discussion of his race against Alan Keyes, perhaps the best example of what can happen when a campaign based upon actual character and ideals comes up against empty “values” rhetoric. That is a story that I would love to hear to reinforce my general, if sometimes misplaced, faith in the voters of this country. Overall, I would heartily recommend this book to anyone left of Attila the Hun that would like to learn more about someone who figures to play a role in national politics for many years to come (he’s only six years older than I am).

Perhaps I also read this book out of envy. The Chicagoland area has a legitimate warrior for justice and equality. Harumph. My senator won on a campaign whose cornerstone was questioning the patriotism of a man who lost three limbs fighting in Vietnam. Seriously. That he won a public office at all, much less a seat in the U.S. Senate, speaks more to the detriment of the voters in my environs than to the character of the victor. (I can’t believe I made it through this paragraph without using the phrase “douche bag”)

Extremely Loud Discussion

I missed this since I was traveling for work last week, but Slate ran a multi-day discussion of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I loved his first book (not everyone did), Everything Is Illuminated. Govern yourself accordingly.