I've acquired a love for non-fiction and biography that I never had as a younger man. After many years of reading mass market science fiction and fantasy I've gotten burned out on that sort of book, and in broadening my horizons I've discovered a love for books like "Lay the Favorite" by Beth Raymer. No one could be more surprised than me, but I like reading non-fiction. It allows me the vicarious thrill of seeing a crazy and downright dangerous life without having to have one. I'm like most boring people, I secretly crave a life of adventure, but what I want is all the wild highs without any of the devastating lows that come with adventurous lives.
If even half of what Beth Raymer describes in her book is true, this is a woman who has had a very interesting life. The book is as much about the author herself as it is about the world of bookies and professional gamblers. Thankfully, she doesn't get too detailed about the way the business of professional gambling works. Instead, this book is about about the characters who inhabit that world. Men who might be millionaires one month, and flat broke the next. Socially inept math prodigies who discover at an early age that gambling will bring in more money and, in a strange way, respect, than working as accountants or bankers. These are men who make more money in a single month than some of us will make in our entire lives, and earn most of that money under the table. They have no idea how much money they have, but instead live on a river of cash that constantly flows through their hands until horrific shattering moments when they cannot cover their bets and zero out all at once.
Much of the book is about the author's relationship with Dink, a professional sports gambler from Las Vegas, and Bernard, another sports gambler from New York who eventually sets up an off shore gambling site in Costa Rica. However, there's more than just this. A lot more. The book covers the author's complicated love life, her short career as an amateur boxer, her time working for another gambler at an off shore sports gambling site, and her own rather colorful childhood with a father who was a compulsive gambler. And she manages to do it in a book that is short and tightly edited. At a little over two-hundred pages I was able to finish the book in just a few evenings.
Is everything in this book true? The book does have the ring of truth to it. I've known a few people in the "cash economies" over the years, but I've stayed well away from having as interesting a life as Beth Raymer has. I've had a brief peek into those worlds, and seen the same situations and characters as she has; if however briefly. Have I met people with lives as wild and screwed up as hers? Oh yes indeed I have, so the situations and characters in her book do ring true. If she's making stuff up, she's a hell of a story teller.
There is a Douglas Heimowitz in Las Vegas, so following up to find out if he's a professional gambler called Dink isn't too difficult. Fact checking a number of other things in this book, such as Raymer's brief boxing career, turns up nothing but truth.
Is the book worth it? Yes indeed it is. I got it as a library book, and I'm well tempted to buy it so I can own it and reread it whenever I want. Clearly, I'm not the only person who thinks so, because it's in production to be turned into a movie. However, no movie will be able to capture the full breadth of what happens in this book. Maybe an HBO series might be able to, but not a movie. Since the movie's producers have cast Bruce Willis in the role of the 375 pound, Jewish, and socially inept Dink I'm going to assume that the movie is going to be terrible. When the movie does come out, don't hold it against the book.
