Jackpot Nation: Rambling and Gambling Across Our Landscape of Luck - Hardcover

Hoffer, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006076144X ISBN 13: 9780060761448

Publisher: Harper, 2007

Synopsis

Is this a great country or what? You can bet on the turn of the card, a roll of the dice—but also the NFL, the NCAA, and which Olson twin marries first. We bet $80 million a year, the amount growing wildly as more and more people gain access to this huge American wheel of fortune. No longer quarantined in Las Vegas, gambling has become as local as our neighborhood cineplex. It's no wonder that we spend more money gambling than we do on movies, music, sports, video games, and theme parks combined! If there's not a casino around the corner, there's one on your laptop computer.

In Jackpot Nation, acclaimed Sports Illustrated writer Richard Hoffer takes us on a headlong tour, alternately horrifying and hilarious, across our landscape of luck, discovering just how ridiculously determined we are to gamble. Whether he's trying to win a side of bacon in a Minnesota bar, hustling a paper sack filled with $100,000 cash across Las Vegas parking lots, poring over expansion plans with a tribal chief in California, or visiting a retired bus salesman with a poor understanding of three-game parlays in his New York prison cell, Hoffer finds a national inclination—a cultural predisposition, even—to take a chance.

Hoffer shows us how Americans—adventurers at heart—have embraced this ability to take recreational risks with a surprising gusto. But as he pokes into this country's far corners, traveling coast to coast with odds as his copilot, he uncovers more than just the playful exercise of that age-old fantasy—something for nothing. He discovers that the very institutions that used to regulate this workout are now its biggest cheerleaders. Whereas government, religion, and business once restricted our ability to gamble, making it taboo even, they have now taken ownership of the pastime. Yesterday's numbers racket is today's state lottery; yesterday's mobbed-up casino is now part of a Fortune 500 company. It's one thing to recognize the house edge, but sometimes it's quite another to figure out who actually owns the house.

Still, Hoffer manages to find the fun in all this, as equally delighted with the delirium of a slot machine trade show as the religious risk of an underground poker game, almost right beneath the spires of the Mormon Tabernacle. He concludes that people are, mostly, having a good time. If he also uncovers a downside—the outlandish vigorish that comes with its growing acceptance—well, that's why they call it gambling.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Hoffer is an award-winning senior writer for Sports Illustrated and the author of A Savage Business: The Comeback and Comedown of Mike Tyson. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

From School Library Journal:

Adult/High School—According to Hoffer, America is a nation strung out on gambling. The book is loosely modeled on Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (Houghton, 2001), and the author theorizes that the pioneer spirit is so ingrained in the collective American psyche that we can't help being a nation of risk takers succumbing to the "thrill of possibility." Taking readers on a fast and frenzied romp, he explores the adrenaline-pumping highs and inevitable lows of what he considers the American fixation on risk-reward schemes. He covers the gamut from illicit Utahan gambling parlors hidden away in dingy dark corners to the glitz and glamour of Vegas, and from rural West Virginian slot-machine establishments to those betting on their own genetic luck while undergoing DNA testing for proof of Indian blood (so as to capitalize on Indian-casino fortunes). Even the government seems on the take, having created the lottery as a legal form of gambling to subsidize "budgetary shortfalls." The testosterone-laden narrative employs such descriptions as "snot cracking frigid," which may resonate with young males. Gambling- and sports-oriented jargon is freely used, rendering some sentences incomprehensible to the virgin gambler. Less serious and more anecdotal than Schlosser's researched book, Jackpot Nation will appeal to pop-culture enthusiasts, teens with a penchant for gambling, and social-studies students researching addictive behaviors.—Jodi Mitchell, Durham County Library, NC
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 006076144X
• ISBN 13: 9780060761448
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256