This month’s posting is going to be brief. I’ve spent the bulk of the month writing a story for a contest and reading Rachel Kadish’s astonishing novel The Weight of Ink, and I’m not going to discuss either one today. Instead I’m going to focus on a couple of highly entertaining and quite educational works of nonfiction.
The first is The Ghosts of Eden Park, a work of popular history by Karen Abbott, a scrupulous researcher and a teller of tales skillful enough to rival Erik Larsen. I’m calling the author Karen Abbott because that’s the name on her book, but if you Google her, you will learn that she recently changed her name to Abbott Kahler for reasons she explains quite clearly on her website. Ghosts of Eden Park resurrects the once-infamous, now forgotten George Remus, known in his day as the King of the Bootleggers, and clearly a model for Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. (Abbott uses lines from The Great Gatsby as section titles in her book.) In telling this sordid tale and documenting all of it with over 70 pages of notes, Abbott reintroduces the modern reader to Prohibition and its concomitant corruption. George Remus, the central figure around whom so many other zanies orbit, could have been a character out of a noir by James M. Cain: the crafty crook who believes he’s invincible until he’s undone by a femme fatale. In this case, the femme was his wife.
The second title I want to mention is Oliver Roeder’s Seven Games, which the jacket describes as “a group biography of seven enduring and beloved games,” and which delivers delightfully on that promise. Roeder gives us the history, the rules, the reigning human champions, and the computer programmers who attempt to “solve” each of these games, in this order: Checkers, Chess, Go, Backgammon, Poker, Scrabble, and Bridge. Whether you have played these games or not—and I would suspect that most Americans have played Checkers and that few Americans have played Go—you will learn a lot and will enjoy Roeder’s lively reporting. Despite the claim on the jacket that the book is a biography of games, Roeder himself calls it “A Human History,” and while it’s unlikely that this work will end up as the central text in an anthropology class, Roeder finds plenty of highly skilled experts whose love for and obsession with each game gives each chapter its pulse.
Happy reading.