Sounds like a fabulous true crash and burn counter memoir. zg
The Rush of Gaming the Casino
By DWIGHT GARNER
March 30, 2010 | NY TIMES
Josh Axelrad’s “Repeat Until Rich,” his new memoir about winning some $700,000 playing professional blackjack, emits a lively hum from the second you crack it open. Like Dave Eggers in “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” Mr. Axelrad tattoos every available surface of his book’s front matter.
Josh Axelrad
First there’s his acknowledgments page, which is among the freshest I’ve seen since the one in Thom Jones’s 1995 story collection, “Cold Snap.” In that book Mr. Jones thanked two major drug companies — Wyeth/Ayerst Laboratories and Stuart Pharmaceuticals — for “further expanding that narrow channel of joy by manufacturing Effexor and Elavil; drugs so good they feel illegal.” In “Repeat Until Rich,” Mr. Axelrad thanks a different set of enablers, including the Internal Revenue Service, as well as “Chase MasterCard, American Express, Discover Financial Services and everyone else who believed.”
Then there’s Mr. Axelrad’s “Note on Veracity,” in which he admits necessarily changing some names and other details in “Repeat Until Rich.” He also admits that he’s broke, having squandered his blackjack winnings playing, like the hipster doofus he sometimes seems to be, online poker.
He warns potential readers: “Now and again it gets florid (the prose).”
He adds, “I am, for what it’s worth, just your standard Semitic American living on the precipice in Brooklyn these days, drinking bourbon and watching the sky fall, and trying to take care of my plants. My only hope here is to cheer you.”
God knows he does that. The first two-thirds of “Repeat Until Rich” read like a rocket, a literate and swaggering heist caper of the sort that Jonathan Lethem and Quentin Tarantino might fry up together from an old Elmore Leonard recipe. The book’s last third — the part in which Mr. Axelrad loses it all and enters Gamblers Anonymous — falls hideously back to earth. Mr. Axelrad is less suited, temperamentally, to meditating on gloom, failure and crippling inertia than he is to describing what it feels like to run amok as the bandit king of Las Vegas. So let’s focus on that glittering bit for a moment.
MORE- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/books/31book.html
The Rush of Gaming the Casino
By DWIGHT GARNER
March 30, 2010 | NY TIMES
Josh Axelrad’s “Repeat Until Rich,” his new memoir about winning some $700,000 playing professional blackjack, emits a lively hum from the second you crack it open. Like Dave Eggers in “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” Mr. Axelrad tattoos every available surface of his book’s front matter.
Josh Axelrad
First there’s his acknowledgments page, which is among the freshest I’ve seen since the one in Thom Jones’s 1995 story collection, “Cold Snap.” In that book Mr. Jones thanked two major drug companies — Wyeth/Ayerst Laboratories and Stuart Pharmaceuticals — for “further expanding that narrow channel of joy by manufacturing Effexor and Elavil; drugs so good they feel illegal.” In “Repeat Until Rich,” Mr. Axelrad thanks a different set of enablers, including the Internal Revenue Service, as well as “Chase MasterCard, American Express, Discover Financial Services and everyone else who believed.”
Then there’s Mr. Axelrad’s “Note on Veracity,” in which he admits necessarily changing some names and other details in “Repeat Until Rich.” He also admits that he’s broke, having squandered his blackjack winnings playing, like the hipster doofus he sometimes seems to be, online poker.
He warns potential readers: “Now and again it gets florid (the prose).”
He adds, “I am, for what it’s worth, just your standard Semitic American living on the precipice in Brooklyn these days, drinking bourbon and watching the sky fall, and trying to take care of my plants. My only hope here is to cheer you.”
God knows he does that. The first two-thirds of “Repeat Until Rich” read like a rocket, a literate and swaggering heist caper of the sort that Jonathan Lethem and Quentin Tarantino might fry up together from an old Elmore Leonard recipe. The book’s last third — the part in which Mr. Axelrad loses it all and enters Gamblers Anonymous — falls hideously back to earth. Mr. Axelrad is less suited, temperamentally, to meditating on gloom, failure and crippling inertia than he is to describing what it feels like to run amok as the bandit king of Las Vegas. So let’s focus on that glittering bit for a moment.
MORE- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/books/31book.html
