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A Family Love Affair with Gambling
Tarcher
February 2008
On Sale: February 14, 2008
240 pages
ISBN: 1585425583
EAN: 9781585425587
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A gloriously written memoir of growing up in a family of
hard-core gamblers-Martha Frankel thought the gambling gene
had passed her by, until she found herself addicted to
online poker and knee-deep in debt.
Most
weekends when Martha Frankel was a kid, her mother had a
mah-jongg game going in the kitchen with her girlfriends
while their husbands were in the living room playing poker.
Once Frankel reached adulthood, however, while her cousins
were making their way in the world as bookies and drug
dealers, gambling didn't much factor into her life.
In the tradition of Five-Finger Discount by Helene
Stapinski and Dry by Augusten Burroughs, Hats
& Eyeglasses traces Frankel's love affair with
poker. It was a passion that bit her in her mid-forties and
remained harmless enough when she stuck to real cards. But
everything changed one evening in 1998 in Atlantic City,
when Frankel overheard one dealer bemoan the fact that his
tips that evening were going to be small what with the
meager crowd assembled. Another dealer mentioned that
everyone must be playing online-"Why leave the house when
you can play in your pajamas?" the dealer said. Why
indeed? thought Frankel, who couldn't wait to get back
to her computer. The next morning she took a deep breath,
typed in her credit card number, and entered the world of
online gambling. It was the beginning of what one of her
uncles called "hats and eyeglasses," a term used to describe
those times when you're losing so bad you're drowning (so
all one can see is the poker player's hat and eyeglasses
floating on the surface of the water). By turns hilarious
and heartbreaking, Hats & Eyeglasses is a tale of
passion, addiction-and those times in life when we almost
lose our shirt.
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