The Education of a Poker Player
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Publisher Description
"In writing about poker Jim McManus has managed to write about everything, and it's glorious."—David Sedaris
New York Times-bestselling author James McManus offers up a collection of seven stories narrated by Vincent Killeen, an Irish Catholic altar boy, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Persuaded at age eight by his grandmother that entering the priesthood will guarantee salvation for every member of his family, Vince eagerly commits to attending a Jesuit seminary for high school. As the meaning of a vow of celibacy becomes clearer to him, however, and he is exposed to the irresistible temptations of poker and girls, life as a seminarian begins to seem less appealing. These autobiographical stories are enlightening and evocative, providing keen, often humorous insight into Catholicism, faith, celibacy and its opposite, as well as America's—and increasingly the world's—favorite card game.
James McManus has been called "poker's Shakespeare." He is the New York Times-bestselling author of Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker and Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, among others. He has been the poker columnist for the New York Times and currently writes the history column for CardPlayer. His work has also appeared in Harper's, The Believer, Paris Review, Esquire, and in Best American anthologies for poetry, sports writing, science and nature, and magazine writing. He has spoken about poker at Yale, Harvard, Google, Goldman Sachs, and on numerous media outlets, and is the recipient of the Peter Lisagor Award for Sports Journalism and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among other awards. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McManus (Positively Fifth Street) tracks the tribulations of boyhood with ironic humor in the seven linked stories that make up this portrait of a feisty young Catholic boy in 1960s suburban Illinois. Nine-year-old Vince Killeen searches for a sense of logic when religious mandates seem to contradict all evidence of how the world works in practice. The boy is a charmer, giving readers the lowdown on everything from deceptive communion to why it's not okay to look at nipples. As Vince grows older with each story, his initial dream of being the first Irish-American pope (to save his family from "millennia in Purgatory") becomes hard to fulfill given the presence of poker and Corvette backseat necking in these lively stories. This entertaining coming-of-age tale treads lightly on issues of guilt, opting instead to allow witty cultural references and a likable voice to carry the narrative. The title is catchy, but the most memorable scenes here don't involve much poker at all; the fun comes from discovering with Vince that sin (and life, thus far) can't always be measured in Hail Marys and Our Fathers.