Volume 53, Number 5 · March 23, 2006
The Best and the Brightest
By Al Alvarez
One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey "The Kid" Ungar, the World's Greatest Poker Player
by Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson, with a foreword by Mike Sexton
Atria, 316 pp., $25.00
The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time
by Michael Craig
Warner, 282 pp., $24.95
According to Alexis de Tocqueville, belief in luck was one of the fundamental characteristics that separated the closed hierarchical societies of Europe from the wide-open democracy of the New World, where class distinctions were fluid and the possibility of going from log cabin to White House wasn't a foolish dream: 'Those who live in the midst of democratic fluctuations,' he wrote, 'have always before their eyes the image of chance, and they end by liking all undertakings in which chance plays a part.'
Review, 3607 words
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