Book Review - Poker Face, by Katy Lederer

let's say 4 out of 5 stars...that's a good way to rank.

I saw a review for this somewhere else, remembered it, and picked it up with a copy of the Biggest Game in Town for nice easy reading when I got sick of poker tomes about pot odds...

Katy's book is about growing up in the Lederer family. I found it to be very similar to Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" in the way it flows - children growing up and leaving a household that wasn't 100 percent functional for the Promised Land. And as the first one (Howard) makes his way in the world, he brings the next sibling and so on and like the McCourts, eventually the Mom ends up joining the family in the new world.

The book is broken into two parts....the first part is what it's like to be a child in the family in New England. - we don't see the famous Professor or TOC winners, but the brother who marks liquor bottles to see if anyone had been drinking, or the sister sneaking thru Mom's purse for a few bucks.

You get a hinted glimpse of issues within the family (without going into too much detail, she implies drug and psychological issues) and her own as her world slowly moves away from a Prep School Teacher's daughter into a strange place where $100 bills lie around in brown bags. To us, the idea of Howard Lederer being a professional gambler is a given, but here you see what his father thought of it so many yrs. ago in NYC.

Part II deals with her college yrs, and what would be an aborted attempt at following in the poker Footsteps of her more famous brother and sister. This part of the book will probably be the most interesting to the 2+2 crowd. Luckily for us, she wasn't as successful as they were and stayed on the writer's path instead.

I went thru this in almost one afternoon, and for what it is (basically a family memoir about famous people we know and even post on here sometimes...), it's pretty good. And in my case, I like poker stories, but I get sick of poker books - this is sorta half poker and half personal, and well, heck...I liked it.

My only negative thought initially was it airs a lot of dirty laundry, and as she says in the foreward, her memories of how certain things happened are not shared by other family members....but it brings up the good times too - so in the end....it all balances out - I would be curious what Annie or Howard think of it, but I'm not gonna ask...

carry on.

RB