Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
Walter Kirn, 2014
W.W. Norton & Co.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780871404510


Summary
An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer.

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn—then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage—set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet.

Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer.

Kirn's one-of-a-kind story of being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley takes us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the posh private clubrooms of Manhattan to the hard-boiled courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles. As Kirn uncovers the truth about his friend, a psychopath masquerading as a gentleman, he also confronts hard truths about himself. Why, as a writer of fiction, was he susceptible to the deception of a sinister fantasist whose crimes, Kirn learns, were based on books and movies? What are the hidden psychological links between the artist and the con man?

To answer these and other questions, Kirn attends his old friend’s murder trial and uses it as an occasion to reflect on both their tangled personal relationship and the surprising literary sources of Rockefeller's evil. This investigation of the past climaxes in a tense jailhouse reunion with a man whom Kirn realizes he barely knew—a predatory, sophisticated genius whose life, in some respects, parallels his own and who may have intended to take another victim during his years as a fugitive from justice: Kirn himself.

Combining confessional memoir, true crime reporting, and cultural speculation, Blood Will Out is a Dreiser-esque tale of self-invention, upward mobility, and intellectual arrogance. It exposes the layers of longing and corruption, ambition and self-delusion beneath the Great American con. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Akron, Ohio, USA
• Raised—Saint Croix, Minnesota
• Education—B.A., Princeton University, B.A., Oxford University (UK)
• Currently—lives in Livingston, Montana


Walter Kirn is an American novelist, literary critic, and essayist. He is the author of eight books, including Up in the Air, which was made into a movie starring George Clooney, and Blood Will Out, a memoir of his friendship with the imposter and convicted murder, Clark Rockefeller.

A 1983 graduate of Princeton University, he has published a collection of short stories and several novels, including Thumbsucker, which was made into a 2005 film featuring Keanu Reeves and Vince Vaughn; Up in the Air, which was made into a 2009 film directed by Jason Reitman; and Mission to America. In 2005, he took over weblogger Andrew Sullivan's publication for a few weeks while Sullivan was on vacation. He has also written The Unbinding, an Internet-only novel that was published in Slate magazine.

He has also reviewed books for New York magazine and has written for The New York Times Book Review and New York Times Sunday Magazine, and is a contributing editor of Time, where he has received popularity for his entertaining and sometimes humorous first-person essays among other articles of interest. He also served as an American cultural correspondent for the BBC.

In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Montana, Kirn was the 2008–09 Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago. He received his A.B. in English at Princeton University in 1983, and obtained a second undergraduate degree in English Literature at Oxford University, where he was a Keasbey Scholar.

Personal life
Kirn's family joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when he was twelve. Although he is no longer affiliated with the church, he received the 2009 William Law X-Mormon of the Year award. In 1995, Kirn married Maggie McGuane, a model and journalist and the daughter of actress Margot Kidder and novelist Thomas McGuane. Kirn was 32 at the time; McGuane was 19. The couple had two children, Masie and Charlie, and are now divorced. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/16/2014.)

Book Reviews
[P]rimarily a tale of seduction. For 15 years, Mr. Kirn allowed himself to fall for the con man then calling himself Clark Rockefeller, certain that if he let their friendship persist, he’d find...a book in it.... There is the part of Mr. Kirn that will always be the Midwestern arriviste [who] sees The Great Gatsby around every corner; he’s certainly right in thinking of Clark as self-invented. As for The Talented Mr. Ripley, that works, too; this is a book about a man who will do anything to steal others’ identities, no matter what it takes to get those others out of his way.


Walter Kirn’s latest book is bound to be shelved in the crime section. But it’s actually about class.... In this smart, real-life psychological thriller, the fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald, chronicling upper-crust America in free fall.... In the end, his book isn’t about the fake Rockefeller but about the mysteries of Kirn’s—and by extension, our—response to him.
Nina Burleigh - New York Times Book Review


[A] fascinating account of the imposter he considered his friend for 10 years… Blood Will Out is an exploration of a hoaxer from the point of view of a mark, and of a relationship based on interlocking deceptions and self-deceptions. The result is a moral tale about the dangers of social climbing on a rickety ladder—for both those trying to scramble up the rungs and those trying to hold it steady below.
Heller McAlpin - Washington Post


Riveting and disturbing, Blood Will Out is a mélange of memoir, stranger-than-fiction crime reporting and cultural critique. The literary markers run the gamut from James Ellroy’s My Dark Places, and Fyodor Doestoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley trilogy and Strangers on a Train. Kirn’s self-lacerating meditations on class, art, vanity, ambition, betrayal and delusion elevate the material beyond its pulpy core… Kirn’s belated acceptance of reality provides the most fascinating and frustrating element of this engaging, self-flagellating memoir.
Larry Lebowitz - Miami Herald


One of the most honest, compelling and strangest books about the relationship between a writer and his subject ever penned by an American scribe… Each new revelation comes subtly, and each adds to the pathetic and creepy portrait of Clark Rockefeller as a vacuous manipulator… The ending of Blood Will Out is at once deeply ambiguous and deeply satisfying. By then, Kirn has looked into the eyes of a cruel, empty man—and learned a lot about himself in the process.
Hector Tobar - Los Angeles Times


Kirn is such a good writer and Gerhartsreiter such a baroquely, demonically colorful subject, you could imagine this being a fine read had they no personal connection. That they did, however, elevates Blood Will Out to another level: Kirn lards his story with detail while reviewing his own psyche, in an attempt to discover how he—a journalist!—could have been so fooled. The irony? With all due respect to Kirn's skills as a novelist, it is hard to conceive of any fictionalized version of ''Clark Rockefeller'' being as compelling as the real thing.
Clark Collis - Entertainment Weekly


Kirn bravely lays bare his own vanities and follies in this heart-pounding true tale; he examines the hold of fiction on the human imagination—how we live for it and occasionally die for it, too.
Judith Newman - More Magazine


The story of Blood Will Out is one of cosmic ironies and jaw-dropping reversals… What makes Blood Will Out so absorbing is its teller more than its subject. Kirn’s persona is captivating—funny, pissed off, highly literate, and self-searching. He’s also an elegant, classic writer… Add the highly readable, intricately told Blood Will Out to the list of great books about the dizzying tensions of the writing life and the maddening difficulty of getting at the truth.
Amity Gaige - Slate


In the summer of 1998, Kirn....entered a wild and murky 15-year friendship with the man who called himself "Clark Rockefeller"—a man who would eventually be the target of a nationwide FBI manhunt and charged with murder.... Kirn’s candor, ear for dialogue, and crisp prose make for a masterful true crime narrative that is impossible to put down. The book deserves to become a classic.
Publishers Weekly


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Library Journal


The complicated, credulity-straining relationship between the author and his subject leaves the reader wondering about both of them. This is a book about two very strange characters. One is best known as Clark Rockefeller, "the most prodigious serial imposter in recent history".... The other is Kirn a respected journalist and novelist.... A book that casts long-form narrative journalism in general, and Kirn's in particular, in an unflattering light.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait
Blake Bailey, 2014
W.W. Norton
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393239577


Summary
The renowned biographer’s unforgettable portrait of a family in ruins—his own.

Meet the Baileys—Burck, a prosperous lawyer once voted the American Legion’s "Citizen of the Year" in his tiny hometown of Vinita, Oklahoma; his wife Marlies, who longs to recapture her festive life in Greenwich Village as a pretty young German immigrant, fresh off the boat; their addled son Scott, who repeatedly crashes the family Porsche; and Blake, the younger son, trying to find a way through the storm. "You’re gonna be just like me," a drunken Scott taunts him. "You’re gonna be worse.v

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Blake Bailey has been hailed as "addictively readable" (New York Times) and praised for his ability to capture lives "compellingly and in harrowing detail" (Time). The Splendid Things We Planned is his darkly funny account of growing up in the shadow of an erratic and increasingly dangerous brother, an exhilarating and sometimes harrowing story that culminates in one unforgettable Christmas. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 1, 1963
• Where—Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• Education—B.A., Tulane University
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Norfolk, Virginia


Blake Bailey is an American writer widely known for his literary biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He is the editor of the Library of America omnibus editions of Cheever's stories and novels—and was a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Early years and career
Bailey grew up in Oklahoma City and went to college at Tulane University, from which he graduated in 1985. Following graduation, he wrote occasional free-lance pieces and taught gifted eighth-graders at a magnet school in New Orleans.

After publishing a long critical profile of Richard Yates, Bailey contracted to write a full-length biography of the novelist, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. Published in 2003, the biography became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2005, Bailey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on his biography, Cheever: A Life, which then won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He also edited a two-volume edition of Cheever's work for the Library of America.

In 2010, Bailey received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That year he also served as a judge for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and, in 2012, for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

In an interview with the New York Times (11/17/2012), Philip Roth said that Bailey was his official biographer and at work on that project. Recently Bailey published his biography of the novelist Charles Jackson, Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, as well as a 2014 memoir of his own growing up years, The Splendid Things We Planned.

He is married to Mary Brinkmeyer, a psychologist at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth. Together they have a daughter. The family lost their house and most of their possessions in the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, an experience he wrote about in a series of articles for Slate, the online magazine.

Bailey is currently the Mina Hohenberg Darden Professor of Creative Writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/15/2014.)

Book Reviews
This is a slender book, one that relies only on memory and acknowledges memory's weakness, especially when alcoholism is involved. And however painful the process of putting it together might have been, [Blake] gives it a novelist's flair. This narrative begins slowly, but it quickly picks up steam and becomes a sleek, dramatic, authentically lurid story fueled by candid fraternal rivalry…The takeaway from this vivid, tender book is that it can be as valuable for a reader to know a biographer as it is for a biographer to know his or her subject. Anyone who reads Blake Bailey's future work…will find it illuminating to know who's telling the story.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


Think of the opening sections of The Splendid Things We Planned, Blake Bailey's achingly honest memoir, as a kind of personality test or perhaps an obstacle course. Not every reader is going to pass, but then again, not every reader is entitled to such a fearless, deeply felt and often frightening book&#8230what lies ahead is a difficult and often remarkable tale of an unhappy family unlike any other…[Bailey] never panders for a reader's sympathy. His prose is clean and graceful without being overwrought, and he often finds unexpected places for deft turns of phrase…it is a testament to his courage that he decided to share this tale at all. It doesn't strive for any false or overreaching profundity, and yet it arrives at a certain undeniable truth about how we are capable of feeling love for people we would never choose to be around.
Dave Itzkoff -New York Times Book Review


Bailey maintains an almost impossible balance between stringent assessment…and a kind of unflappable empathy… The book is as clear-eyed and heartbreaking as any of his acclaimed biographies…yet every bit as compelling.
Kate Tuttle - Boston Globe


Manages to do justice to the tedium of chronic dysfunction without becoming tedious itself…Compelling because of Bailey's emotional acuity as well as his wit, which emerges as an adaptive coping mechanism—a way to survive despair by streaking it with light.
Leslie Jamison - San Francisco Chronicle


[Told with] scathing honesty…grotesque and grimly funny…[Bailey's] struggle as a writer looking for truth and as a brother and son looking for catharsis gives the book an unsettling urgency…its specific story, about a family spinning out of control, naturally points to wider, shared experience, and pushes us to consider what we owe our parents, siblings, and children—and what they owe us in return.
Ian Crouch - newyorker.com


Very entertaining [and] immensely enjoyable—but also profoundly, persuasively sad. Like Mary Karr or David Sedaris, Bailey doesn't try to manufacture an answer to the questions posed by his family's failings.
 Elyse Moody - Elle


Vibrantly evocative and car-crash engrossing.
Clark Collis - Entertainment Weekly


It seems fitting that biographer Bailey tells the story of his own life by chronicling his brother Scott’s alcoholism and drug addiction.... Bailey’s story captures the contradictions and tensions that simmer just below the surface of the family, as they try to live a normal suburban life in Oklahoma...and Bailey tells it wonderfully, in a tragicomic tone that slowly reveals the true depths to which his older brother has sunk.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) The Bailey family...live[s] the American dream.... Or so it seems. But Scott—handsome, impetuous, and selfish—allows his demons to take over..... [A] maddening portrait of Scott—and the rest of the Baileys, seen through the lens of Scott's descent—takes shape. The effect of the writing and Bailey's own wrestling with time, memory, and loss lingers after the final passages. —Patrick A. Smith, Bainbridge Coll., GA
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Goofy and affectionate but deeply self-destructive, Bailey’s older brother, Scott, careened from one disaster to the next.... The result is a haunting portrait of more than one tortured soul and a heartfelt probing of the limits of brotherly love. As the memoir’s epigraph achingly reminds us, “You can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person.” —Brendan Driscoll
Booklist


[A] bleak, repetitious memoir.... The title...comes from a song Scott liked, Roy Clark's 1969 "Yesterday When I was Young": "…The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned/ I always built to last on weak and shifting sand." Bailey gives no evidence of his or his brother's splendid plans, only decades of depression, isolation and insidious self-absorption.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Michael Lewis, 2014
W.W. Norton & Co.
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393244663


Summary
Michael Lewis returns to Wall Street to report on a high-tech predator stalking the equity markets.

Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post–financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading—source of the most intractable problems—will have no advantage whatsoever.

The characters in Flash Boys are fabulous, each completely different from what you think of when you think “Wall Street guy.” Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world’s stock exchanges, and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.

The light that Lewis shines into the darkest corners of the financial world may not be good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you. But in the end, Flash Boys is an uplifting read. Here are people who have somehow preserved a moral sense in an environment where you don’t get paid for that; they have perceived an institutionalized injustice and are willing to go to war to fix it. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 15, 1960
• Where—New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton; M.B.A., London School of Economics
• Currently—Currently—lives in Berkeley, California


Michael Lewis is an American contemporary non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (2014); The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010); The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (2006); Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003); and Liar's Poker (1989).

Background
Lewis was born in New Orleans to corporate lawyer J. Thomas Lewis and community activist Diana Monroe Lewis. He attended the private, nondenominational, co-educational college preparatory Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. Later, he attended Princeton University where he received a BA in art history in 1982 and was a member of the Ivy Club.

After graduating from Princeton, he went on to work with New York art dealer Daniel Wildenstein. Despite his degree in art history, he nonetheless wanted to break into Wall Street to make money. After leaving Princeton, he tried to find a finance job, only to be roundly rejected by every firm to which he applied. He then enrolled in the London School of Economics to pursue a Master's degree in economics.

While still in England, Lewis was invited to a banquet hosted by the Queen Mother at St. James's Palace. His cousin, Baroness Linda Monroe von Stauffenberg, one of the organizers of the banquet, purposely seated him next to the wife of the London Managing Partner of Salomon Brothers. The hope was that Lewis, just having obtained his master's degree, might impress her enough for her to suggest to her husband that Lewis be given a job with Salomon Bros.—which had previously turned him down. The strategy worked: Lewis was granted an interview and landed a job.

As a result of the job offer, Lewis moved to New York City for Salomon's training program. There, he was appalled at the sheer bravado of most of his fellow trainees and indoctrinated into the money culture of Salomon and Wall Street in general.

After New York, Lewis was shipped to the London office of Salomon Brothers as a bond salesman. Despite his lack of knowledge, he was soon handling millions of dollars in investment accounts. In 1987, he witnessed a near-hostile takeover of Salomon Brothers but survived with his job. However, growing disillusioned with his work, he eventually quit to write Liar's Poker and become a financial journalist.

Writing
Lewis described his experiences at Salomon and the evolution of the mortgage-backed bond in Liar's Poker (1989). In The New New Thing (1999), he investigated the then-booming Silicon Valley and discussed obsession with innovation.

Four years later, Lewis wrote Moneyball (2003), in which he investigated the success of Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. In August 2007, he wrote an article about catastrophe bonds entitled "In Nature's Casino" that appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

The Big Short, about a handful of scrappy investors who foresaw the 2007-08 subprime mortgage debacle, came out in 2010. Flash Boys, detailing high-speed trading in stock and other markets, was published in 2014. Like both The Big Short and Moneyball, the book features an underdog type who is ahead of the pack in understanding his industry.

Lewis has worked for The Spectator, New York Times Magazine, as a columnist for Bloomberg, as a senior editor and campaign correspondent to The New Republic, and a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote the "Dad Again" column for Slate. Lewis worked for Conde Nast Portfolio but in February 2009 left to join Vanity Fair, where he became a contributing editor.

Film
The film version of Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, was successfully released in 2011. The Big Short, with its all-star cast—Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gossling, and Brad Pitt—came out in 2015 to top reviews.

Personal life
Lewis married Diane de Cordova Lewis, his girlfriend prior to his Salomon days. After several years, he was briefly married to former CNBC correspondent Kate Bohner, before marrying the former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren in 1997. Lewis lives with Tabitha, two daughters, and one son (Quinn, Dixie, and Walker) in Berkeley, California. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/11/2016.)

Book Reviews
[D]azzling… Because Mr. Lewis is at the helm finding clear, simple metaphors for even the most impenetrable financial minutiae, this tawdry tale should make sense to anyone. And so should its shock value. Flash Boys is guaranteed to make blood boil.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


When it comes to narrative skill, a reporter’s curiosity, and an uncanny instinct for the pulse of the zeitgeist, Lewis is a triple threat as he’s demonstrated in best-­selling books like The Big Short and Moneyball. But those formidable talents are only intermittently on display in this ultimately unsatisfying probe of high-­frequency traders, who may (or may not) be ripping off investors and destabilizing the global financial system.... Lewis might have pondered how frustrating it is for readers...to be told a story in which the villains aren’t named.
James B. Stewart - New York Times Book Review


Important to public debate about Wall Street… in exposing what one of his central characters calls the "Pandora's box of ridiculousness" that financial exchanges have become.
Philip Delves Broughton - Wall Street Journal


Michael Lewis is a genius, and his book will give high-frequency trading a much-needed turn under the microscope.
Kevin Roose - New York Magazine

A beautiful narrative, so well-written. You’ve got to get this.
Jon Stewart - Daily Show


Remarkable… Michael Lewis has a spellbinding talent for finding emotional dramas in complex, highly technical subjects.
Financial Times


Who knew high-frequency trading was such a sexy subject?
Bloomberg Business Week


Michael Lewis is one of the premier chroniclers of our age.
Huffington Post


Score one for the humans! Critics of high speed, computer-driven trading have a new champion.
CNN Money


If you own stock, you need to read Flash Boys… and then call your broker.
Entertainment Weekly


In 24 hours, I plowed through Michael Lewis' new blockbuster Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, a book about the huge changes that have occurred in financial markets in the last three decades. It's compelling reading.
John Aziz - The Week


Flash Boys richly deserves to be the first chapter in a new discussion of market rules and abuses… Lewis raises troubling and necessary questions.
American Conservative


In his latest captivating expedition into the marketplace jungle, Lewis (Moneyball) explores how the rise of computerized stock exchanges and their attendant scams started a battle for the soul of Wall Street.... The result is an engrossing true-life morality play that unmasks the devil in the details of high finance.
Publishers Weekly


Kirkus Reviews
In trademark Lewis fashion, a data-rich but all-too-human tale of “heuristic data bullshit and other mumbo jumbo” in the service of gaming the financial system, courtesy of—yes, Goldman Sachs and company.... A riveting, maddening yarn that is causing quite a stir already, including calls for regulatory reform.

Discussion Questions
1. Does Michael Lewis do a good job of explaining the arcane practices of Wall Street high frequency trading? If you are not involved in the financial industry, do his explanations make sense to you.

2. Follow-up to Question 1: What are dark pools? Can you explain their role in this high stakes game?

3. Talk about the Wall Street personality "type" as experienced by Brad katsuyama, a Canadian. Do you believe it's a fair assessment...or an overly generalized one?

4. Talk about the skill set of the team that Katsuyama put together. Brad himself admits he was no computer wizard, and Ronan Ryan at one point had no idea what a millisecond was...and, when hired by Katsuyama, had no idea what he was to do. How was Katsuyama's group able to accomplish all they did?

5. What damage is caused by high-frequency trading? Or is it, perhaps, not as damaging as Lewis indicates? Defenders of the practice say it provides market liquidity and efficiency. And, mostly likely, the average investor hardly notices a few pennies here and there. What do you think? How does Lewis respond to defenders of the high-frequency trading?

6. Are there villains in this story? If so, who are they? Katsuyama doesn't want to name names. Why not? What about Goldman Sachs—what is its role?

7. What, if anything, should be done to halt the practice of high-frequency trades? Do you think anything will be done?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Noble Hustle:  Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death
Colson Whitehead, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385537056


Summary
I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside.

So begins the hilarious and unexpectedly moving adventures of an amateur player who lucked into a seat at the biggest card game in town—the World Series of Poker.

In 2011 Grantland magazine sent award-winning novelist Colson Whitehead to brave the harrowing, seven-day gauntlet of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. It was the assignment of a lifetime, except for one hitch—he’d never played in a casino tournament before.

With just six weeks to train, our humble narrator plunged into the gritty subculture of high-stakes Texas Hold'em. There’s poker here, sure, which means joy and heartbreak, grizzled cowboys from the game’s golden age, and teenage hotshots weaned on internet gambling. Not to mention the overlooked problem of coordinating Atlantic City bus schedules with your kid’s drop-off and pick-up at school.

And then there’s Vegas.

In a world full of long shots and short odds, The Noble Hustle is a sure bet, a raucously funny social satire whose main target is the author himself. Whether you’ve been playing cards your whole life or have never picked up a hand, you’re sure to agree that this book contains some of the best writing about beef jerky ever put to paper. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 1969
• Where—New York, New York (USA)
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Awards—PEN/Oakland Award; Whiting Writers Award
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York


Born in 1969 and raised in Manhattan, Colson Whitehead received his undergraduate degree from Harvard. After graduation, he went to work for the Village Voice as a book , television, and music reviewer.

Whitehead's first novel, The Intuitionist, was published in 1999 and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. In 2001, he published John Henry Days, a startlingly original retelling of the famous story from American folklore. The novel received several honors and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2003, a collection of his essays, The Colossus of New York, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the year.

Whitehead's writing continues to attract awards, rave reviews, and a devoted, avid readership. In between books, he produces reviews, essays, short stories, and cultural commentary for a number of distinguished publications, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's, and Granta. He is the recipient of a coveted MacArthur Fellowship (dubbed the "genius grant") , a Whiting Writers Award, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Extras
From a 2009 Barnes & Noble interview:

• Where do I get my ideas? Usually I come across some strange fact in a book, or article, or tv show and think, That's weird, wouldn't it be kooky if...?

• I like to write in the nude—I find the gentle breezes tickle the fine hairs of creativity.

• Here are some of the things I like: staying in the house all day, screening phone calls, keeping the shades drawn. Deglazing. Oh, how I love to deglaze.

• Here's what I dislike: performance art, people who walk slowly in front of me, romantic comedies, panel discussions.

• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, here is his response:

There are many books, obviously. Today I'll go with Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, because I'm feeling nostalgic for a good, long read. I have fond memories of reading it at age 19, while flat broke, in a crappy apartment, with nothing to do but watch Quincy, cook up some cheap halibut, and read GR. I remember getting to the last 100 pages and thinking, "He's not going to end this the way I think he's going to end it, is he? It would be crazy if he did that!" And he did. The lesson being, no idea is too weird—as long as you can pull it off. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
(Starred review.) The eternal tension between good luck and remorseless odds animates this loose-limbed jaunt through the world of high-stakes poker.... [A]n engrossing mix of casual yet astute reportage and hang-dog philosophizing showing us that verything still hangs on the turn of a card.
Publishers Weekly


The author's satirical descriptions and observations...and his interactions with the people who haunt the casinos there are only prolog for the grand finale of the Leisure-Industrial Complex (LIC) of Vegas. Verdict: Entertaining and absorbing. —Mark Manivong, Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC
Library Journal


As a novelist of considerable range, Whitehead consistently writes about more than he’s ostensibly writing about,... here writing a poker book that should strike a responsive literary chord with some who know nothing about [poker].... A minor work by a major novelist, a busman’s holiday, but engaging in its color and character.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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