Last night I started reading Dead Man's Hand: Crime Fiction at the Poker Table. This is a collection of crime-genre short stories all somehow involving poker, all originals by a variety of authors, solicited specifically for this book, edited by Otto Penzler (Harcourt, 2007; see http://www.harcourtbooks.com/bookcatalogs/bookpages/9780151012770.asp).
I've only read the introduction and the first story (which I thought was hard to follow and boring), so I'm not ready to do a full review yet. But I can't resist pointing out the howler in Penzler's "Foreword":
"The great players...used to ply their skills clandestinely, slipping into a town, cleaning out the local hot-shots, and skedaddling before they realized they had been taken by a professional cardsharp. Now they are like rock stars, though they wear clean clothes and take baths. Even occasional televised-poker viewers recognize Johnny Moneymaker, Annie Duke, Howard Lederer, Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, and Amarillo Slim."
Oh, sure--we all recognize Johnny Moneymaker. That's Chris's younger brother, right?
This does not give one great hope that the editor really knows the world of poker all that thoroughly.
I've only read the introduction and the first story (which I thought was hard to follow and boring), so I'm not ready to do a full review yet. But I can't resist pointing out the howler in Penzler's "Foreword":
"The great players...used to ply their skills clandestinely, slipping into a town, cleaning out the local hot-shots, and skedaddling before they realized they had been taken by a professional cardsharp. Now they are like rock stars, though they wear clean clothes and take baths. Even occasional televised-poker viewers recognize Johnny Moneymaker, Annie Duke, Howard Lederer, Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, and Amarillo Slim."
Oh, sure--we all recognize Johnny Moneymaker. That's Chris's younger brother, right?
This does not give one great hope that the editor really knows the world of poker all that thoroughly.
1 comment:
That is horrible! I would scrap the book...
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