Read 'em and Weep: A Bedside Poker Companion

Driven by ESPN's coverage of the annual World Series of Poker and the Travel Channel's unlikely hit coverage of the World Poker Tour, poker is now a hot item in American culture. Both of these shows feature a variety of poker known as Hold 'Em, whose virtue, to television audiences and poker players alike, is its fast pace and""action"" (the number of bets players can make in quick succession). Watching men and women who can bet $200,000 on nothing and win has captivated a new generation. Poker writer Stravinsky's collection of essays, short stories, book excerpts and poems mines some of this excitement, featuring articles on three-time World Series champion Johnny Chan and colorful Hold 'Em legend Amarillo Slim. Likewise, contributions from Andy Bellin and A. Alvarez, both steeped in the contemporary poker scene, will feel familiar to the television-bred Hold 'Em aficionados. But much of the material, though classic--for example, Mark Twain's rumination on poker in Life on the Mississippi and an excerpt from Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm--are from a bygone poker world that lacks the intensity of the modern tournament game. Most of Stravinsky's choices fall into this category. The selections are invariably well chosen: poetry by Billy Collins and Stephen Dunn, short stories by W. Somerset Maugham and James Thurber, among them, but they are aimed at an older, more literary audience and will have little appeal to the new, younger poker fans. This collection falters because it is unable to successfully move between poker's romanticized past and its big-money celebrity-driven present.