Balling the Jack
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Sharp, funny, romantic tale of love and gambling in slacker-generation New York.
Tom Reasons is a young man who takes his pay cheque every week and bets it all on a Friday night ball game. Then it’s either champagne or pot-noodles for a week. He’s lost his girl because he couldn’t commit to her and now he regrets it. He hangs out at an Irish bar and plays on the darts team with his pals. One drunken night, he challenges the captain of the meanest, dirtiest team in the league to a money-match. And then doubles the bet. Now the race is on for Tom to come up with the $40,000 stake and get his team to win without telling them how much pressure they are really under! Great suspense, lots of laughs, true romance.
About the author
Frank Baldwin was born in New York City in 1963. He grew up in New York and in Tokyo, Japan. He graduated from Hamilton College and worked a series of jobs. He was a paralegal, bartender, construction worker and copy editor. He and his wife Lora currently live in San Francisco.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Frat-boy paralegal Tom Reasons makes a drunken bet and ends up having to raise $40,000 in a slick debut that exposes, among other things, the seamy New York underworld of dart games. The lure of the bull's eye isn't Tom's only vice: he is (as he loves to insist) a man's man who lives, when he isn't hurling darts, for beer-drinking, card-playing, bachelor parties and "one on one," which he gets with surprising frequency. It's hard to decide which is more irritating, Tom's relentless self-aggrandizement ("if I win--and I win a lot--I take on the town") or the inanity of his observations on life ("The better the weekend, the tougher the Monday, they say"). It may irritate readers that insufferable Tom actually gets the girl, behaves so honorably toward an honest immigrant that he sacrifices his own job and beats the Mafia at its own game. Baldwin's prose manages to raise darts, perhaps the dullest of spectator sports, to a new level of tedium: "In darts it doesn't take a lot to knock you off stride. An eight of an inch turns a triple 20 into a triple 1." But Baldwin brings blowhards of Tom's ilk to life, no mean feat whether you hate the guy or grudgingly recognize his type. Bn Discovery Program selection; film rights to New Line Cinema.
