Book Rec of the Day 7/9-7/18/2008

HOW TO BEAT VEGAS

Do you like the idea of card-counting, black jack-playing students beating Las Vegas casinos out of more than three million dollars in a two-year period? Then this is the book for you. Though what Kevin Lewis and his friends did was legal, the casinos had their private investigators looking to find out what was going on, and the MIT players were eventually banned from the casinos. In case you’re interested in how it’s done, the last chapter is titled “How to Count Cards and Beat Vegas.”

BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE: THE INSIDE STORY OF SIX MIT STUDENTS WHO TOOK VEGAS FOR MILLIONS, by Ben Mezrich (Free Press, 2002)

Rambunctious Rabbit, the central cartoon character of Lamaar Studios and its amusement park, Familyland, is found strangled to death one morning in the park while still in his rabbit suit. Two detectives, Lomax and Biggs, are assigned to the case and have to keep it quiet out of concern for the entertainment conglomerate’s business. More murders follow and it becomes clear that someone is trying to bring Lamaar Studios down. The plot is clever and the lines are sharp and witty. The two detectives are an enjoyable pair with a penchant for appreciating the comic side of a situation. If you like Janet Evanovich and Carl Hiaasen, you will probably go for The Rabbit Factory in a big way.

THE RABBIT FACTORY, by Marshall Karp (MacAdam Cage, 2006)

THUMBS UP

Lopate states that the five greatest American film critics are Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris. But you can make your own list after reading this collection of film essayists, which includes Carl Sandburg, Edmund Wilson, Ralph Ellison, Susan Sontag, Richard Schickel, Roger Ebert, and more than 50 other famous as well as practically unknown minds wrestling with the product of America’s great art form. Required reading for anyone who loves both the movies and good writing.

AMERICAN MOVIE CRITICS: FROM THE SILENTS UNTIL NOW, edited by Phillip Lopate (Library of America, 2006)

Nora Bondurant never even knew she had an Aunt Amalia in Natchez, Mississippi, until she received a telegram informing her that she had inherited the woman’s house, a dilapidated plantation called Avoca. It turns out that Aunt Amalia had been murdered by a suitor who then killed himself, and Nora—herself troubled by the death of the husband she’s recently divorced—decides to take up residence in Avoca and learn the truth about her Aunt. New Mercies is a wonderful evocation of 1930s Natchez, a world of secrecy and romance.

NEW MERCIES, by Sandra Dallas (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006)

KILLER NONFICTION

“Scrupulously reported and written with Krakauer’s usual exacting flair, Under the Banner of Heaven is both illuminating and thrilling. It is also the creepiest book anyone has written in a long time—and that’s meant as the highest possible praise.”—Newsweek

“I’m not sure what this is all about, but apparently it’s God’s will that you leave this world. Perhaps we can talk about it later.” That’s what Mormon Fundamentalist Dan Lafferty said to his 15-month-old niece before he killed her in 1984. He and his brother Ron also killed her mother because she opposed their belief in polygamy. Krakauer uses the Laffertys’ story to expose Mormon extremists and their fanatical beliefs.

UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN: A STORY OF VIOLENT FAITH, by Jon Krakauer (Anchor, 2004

TWO WOMEN

In 1903, Lily looks back on her life in China’s Hunan Province. Her lifelong friendship (known as laotong, or “old sames”) with Snow Flower is at the heart of this poignant saga of love and history through the 19th century. Judy Fong Bates wrote in The Washington Post, “The wonder of this book is that it takes readers to a place at once foreign and familiar—foreign because of its time and setting, yet familiar because this landscape of love and sorrow is inhabited by us all. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a triumph on every level, a beautiful, heartbreaking story.”

SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN, by Lisa See (Random House, 2005)

TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT

British rock journalist Barney Hoskyns relates the story of southern California rock and roll from the Laurel Canyon, blue jeans, and pot days of the late ’60s to the high-flying stadium concert, Lear jet, and coke nights of the ’70s. He covers everything from Joni Mitchell’s art to David Geffen’s art of the deal and the superstars that sang on his labels. The book is full of sizzling stories from one of the great eras of rock music.

HOTEL CALIFORNIA: THE TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURES OF CROSBY, STILLS, NASH, YOUNG, MITCHELL, TAYLOR, BROWNE, RONSTADT, GEFFEN, THE EAGLES, AND THEIR MANY FRIENDS, by Barney Hoskyns (Wiley, 2006)

Doestoevsky presents us with the brutal Fyodor Karamazov, grotesque and manipulative; his eldest, passionate son, Dimitri; the atheist son, Ivan; and the innocent one, Alyosha. Filling out this strangely rich world of the Russian countryside are the extraordinary mystic Father Zossima; the two women, Katerina and Grushenka; and finally the sinister bastard son, Smerdyakov. Let’s face it, you haven’t fully experienced Russian literature until you’ve read The Brothers Karamazov.

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, by Fyodor Dostoevsky; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1880; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)

A MARINE’S VERSION

“Far more than a glory-soaked collection of war stories, this memoir proves the ideal of the scholar-soldier as alive and well. One can hardly imagine a finer boots-on-the-ground chronicle of this open-ended conflict, no matter how long it may last.”—Kirkus Reviews

One Bullet Away is the gripping story of how a Dartmouth classics major became an officer in the marine special operations force and led his men into Afghanistan and then in the invasion of Iraq. His elite 1st Reconnaissance Battalion unit battled its way all the way up Highway 7.

ONE BULLET AWAY: THE MAKING OF A MARINE OFFICER, by Nathaniel C. Fick (Mariner Books, 2006)

IT’S A MYSTERY

“Sometimes a mystery takes one’s breath away with its impeccable, inexorable logic. King makes two such tales here, whose wheels interlock with a perfect, audible click. . . . A tour-de-force and a great read.”—Booklist (starred review)

When Philip Gilbert, eccentric and obsessive aficionado of all things Sherlock Holmes, turns up facedown in Battery DuMaurier, a relic from San Francisco’s 19th-century military history, detective Kate Martinelli gets to work. An unpublished story by Conan Doyle in Gilbert’s possession tells of a transvestite and her military lover, whose corpse was also found in the Battery. Kate’s investigations lead her back into the Victorian world of Mary Russell, King’s other series detective.

THE ART OF DETECTION, by Laurie R. King (Bantam Books, 2006)