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Cargando... Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (2003)por Katy Lederer
![]() Ninguno Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. ![]() ![]() Katy Lederer's trajectory in becoming a poet was perhaps more unusual than most, and it is that "growing up" that she tells the tale of in her memoir Poker Face. The story/bio has all the elements of a great read considering that her mother (a purported "genius")and older brother and sister all become professional gamblers, first in NY and subsequently in Las Vegas, that saddest and most glittery of American cities. Her father teaches for many years at an elite high school for the very rich in New England, and then becomes an author of books about words and word games. It is in such an environment (where else could a comfortable middle class family feel impoverished?) that the family gets its start and where it falls apart. The materials are so promising, but somehow it doesn't all add up to more than a mildly engaging book. When I first heard the name Lederer, it referred to her father Richard, who is a punning, word-obsessed writer and comic. Then I heard about his offspring in the poker world, Howard and Annie, in the Texas Hold'em tournaments on TV in recent years. Katy is the youngest of the kids. Here she chronicles the family from her childhood, when Richard taught English at a New England prep-school, through the family's dissolution and obsessions. She seems to have escaped. If I hadn't known of the other members of her family, it might have seemed just one more tale of substance abuse and obsession, but I do know of them, and the writing is lovely. And she seems to have escaped to tell the tale. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
"The intricacies of family and the complexities of the games they play mingle wonderfully here in a memoir quite unlike any other."--George Plimpton, author of Truman Capote Katy Lederer grew up on the bucolic campus of an exclusive East Coast boarding school where her father taught English, her mother retreated into crosswords and scotch, and her much older siblings played "grown-up" games like gin rummy and chess. But Katy faced much more than the typical trials of childhood. Within the confines of the Lederer household an unlikely transformation was brewing, one that would turn this darkly intellectual and game-happy group into a family of professional gamblers. Poker Face is Katy Lederer's perceptive account of her family's lively history. From the long kitchen table where her mother played what seemed an endless game of solitaire, to the seedy New York bars where her brother first learned to play poker, to the glamorous Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, where her sister and brother wager hundreds of thousands of dollars a night at the tables, Lederer takes us on a tragicomic journey through a world where intelligence and deceit are used equally as currency. Not since Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood has a writer cast such a witty and astringently analytic eye on the demands of growing up. An unflinching exploration of trust and betrayal, competition, suspicion, and unconventional familial love, Poker Face is a testament to the human spirit's inventiveness when faced with unusually difficult odds. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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