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Players
Once I hear the clatter of chips I almost go into convulsions," said Dostoyevsky, while Anatole France wrote, "The gambler is driven by the fascination of danger at the bottom of all great passions." The characters the reader meets in Players—chess grand masters, poolroom hustlers, or street-hardened practitioners of the short con—are all alike propelled by the ecstasy of risk. "The stake is money," France wrote, "in other words, immediate, infinite possibilities." In fact, as the reader hooks up with David Mamet in the poker room and meets Damon Runyon's Bookie Bob, Saul Bellow's immortal Yellow Kid, and learns from Herbert Asbury about the antics of Izzy and Moe, and from David Maurer about the discreet charm of the confidence man, Walter Tevis on Fast Eddie Felson and Minnesota Fats on the seductions of nineteenth-century gambling dens, high lives and low will merge and the world of gambler and con-artist will blur. Selected writings by Jorge Luis Borges, Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Tosches, and many others are featured.
Encyclopedia of World Poverty
Provides more than eight hundred alphabetical entries that cover issues relating to poverty around the world.
Chasms of Delight
Chasms of Delight is rooted in chemist John Mann's fascination with psychedelic, narcotic and euphoriant drugs. He sets out a colourful history of their discovery and use, telling the story of mind-altering drugs, their contribution to the work of poets and artists, the iniquities of the drug trade and the popular use of drugs in the 60s and 70s.
The Soul of Pleasure
Show business is today so essential to American culture it's hard to imagine a time when it was marginal. But as David Monod demonstrates, the appetite for amusements outside the home was not "natural": it developed slowly over the course of the nineteenth century. The Soul of Pleasure offers a new interpretation of how the taste for entertainment was cultivated. Monod focuses on the shifting connection between the people who built successful popular entertainments and the public who consumed them. Show people discovered that they had to adapt entertainment to the moral outlook of Americans, which they did by appealing to sentiment.The Soul of Pleasure explores several controversial forms of...
Crime and the Rise of Modern America
- Contents:The crimes of the century -- Crime and the West -- Hate crime -- Policing and imprisonment -- Conmen, swindlers, and dupes -- Business and financial crime -- Prohibitions -- Sex crime -- Political crime : scandal, sleaze and corruption -- Terrorists : rebels, radicals and freedom fighters and criminals with a cause -- Immigration and crime.
Andean Cocaine
Illuminating a hidden and fascinating chapter in the history of globalization, Paul Gootenberg chronicles the rise of one of the most spectacular and now illegal Latin American exports: cocaine. Gootenberg traces cocaine's history from its origins as a medical commodity in the nineteenth century to its repression during the early twentieth century and its dramatic reemergence as an illicit good after World War II. Connecting the story of the drug's transformations is a host of people, products, and processes: Sigmund Freud, Coca-Cola, and Pablo Escobar all make appearances, exemplifying the global influences that have shaped the history of cocaine. But Gootenberg decenters the familiar story...
Turn On and Tune In
Timothy Leary's advice to "tune in, turn on and drop out" was a 1960s exhortation to experiment with LSD, but humans had been consuming ergot alkaloids related to lysergic acid diethylamide for at least a thousand years. Opium has been around even longer with its medicinal uses being known to the Ancient Sumerians as long ago as 3400 BC. This is the first book to cover all of the major psychoactive drugs (both natural and synthetic) in one volume, and the only one to cover all aspects of these drugs from their anthropological and sociological influences through to their chemistry and pharmacology. It covers a range of substances including LSD, opium, heroin, cocaine, cannabis, peyote, belladonna, mandrake, and absinthe. The book is highly readable and concentrates on the characters (e.g. authors, painters, pop stars, hippies, politicians and drug barons), both famous and infamous, who have ensured that psychoactive drugs hold an enduring fascination and interest for everyone. The basic chemistry and pharmacological activity covered together with a brief account of useful drugs that have emerged from a study of the psychoactive ones.
Fake Identity?
In North America, imposture narratives of all kinds from ethnic impersonation to confidence games abound because the socio-cultural history and national mythologies of the US and Canada are an especially fertile ground for the invention of identities, whether fake or "real." When discovered, imposture incites fascination and scandal--yet it also showcases how identities are made. Fake identities thus are a negative lens through which the performance of selves become obvious. The essays in this book examine both real and fictional imposture with a special interest in identity performance and in the cultural value attributed to authenticity in Western culture. The North American impostor narrative helps contextualise and historicize how selves are made, from the narrator of colonial travelogues to postmodernist author/narrator voices, from the urban con game to trickster shamanism."
How to Smell a Rat
A timely guide to uncovering financial fraud 2008 and 2009 will be remembered for bear markets, a global credit crunch, and some of the largest investment scams ever. But these scams are nothing new, they've been repeated throughout history, and there will certainly be more to come. But the good news is fraudsters often follow the same basic playbook. Learn the playbook, and know how to ask the right questions, and financial fraud can be easy to detect and simple to avoid. In How to Smell a Rat, trusted financial expert Ken Fisher provides you with an inside's view on how to spot financial disasters before you become a part of them. Filled with in-depth insights and practical advice, this re...
Not Just Lincoln's Tomb Oak Ridge Cemetery
President Lincoln's final resting place is more than just a cemetery. Oak Ridge is the second most visited cemetery in the United States, only Arlington has more visitors each year. It is a place of histories and stories. It is the final resting place of politicians, generals, and heroes. Even some of the private citizens have some interesting stories. This work will take you from the Black Hawk War to the corruption of some early governors. In addition, you will learn about one of the world's best con artists. Find out why there is a gravesite with a buried accordion. Find out how race relations and union tensions came to a head in Illinois to help form the NAACP.
