The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death Audiobook

Quotes

• “Whitehead captures the sketchy and zombielike nature of poker tournament play well enough to leave you wishing this book came with a free bottle of Purell.”

  — Entertainment Weekly

• “Colloquial, with many personal digressions and heavy on pop-culture references, it reads like a memoir crossed with a literary guide to the often bizarre world of casino-poker tournaments.”

  — Wall Street Journal

• “Mordantly funny from the first sentence…Mr. Whitehead may not have gone home in the money, but he has a way with upstanding sentences.”

  — Economist

• "[Whitehead’s] reporting on the grimy glitz of casinos and competitive gambling has a funny, tragic, loser-chic sensibility.”

  — New Yorker

• “Whitehead goes to the table himself, and like a reporter on the front line of battle, he files stories as the action heats up…[Whitehead] uses poker to expand our sense of how human beings work.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “A witty, wandering book about poker…Tom Wolfe crossed with Tom Pynchon.”

  — Washington Post

• “Whitehead was rarely lucky—and maybe that’s what makes this crass, sardonic tour through America’s wasteland of bright lights, overpriced all-you-can-eat menus, and windowless banquet-hall behemoths so funny.”

  — Chicago Tribune

• “With its cast of poker-universe luminaries and aspiring misfits, the tournament stuff is fun, especially to this gambling rube. But Vegas is Vegas, and between the notes of the Wheel of Fortune slot machines, one can hear the suck of entropy. Whitehead…has the wry sense of humor to observe the twisted reality of the ‘Leisure Industrial Complex’ without mocking it; he’s the kind of writer who can see the human condition reflected in the windows of a failed Vegas market that sells only beef jerky (and other jerky-like products). Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

  — Amazon.com, editorial review

• “Whitehead proves a brilliant sociologist of the poker world. He evokes the physical atmosphere vividly, ‘the sleek whisper of laminated paper jetting across the table,’ as the dealer shuffles. But he also conjures the human terrain, laying bare his own psychology and imagining his way into the minds of others. His book affirms what David Foster Wallace’s best nonfiction pieces made so clear: It’s a great idea…to turn a gifted novelist loose on an odd American subculture and see what riches are unearthed.”

  — Boston Globe

• “Shares with [David Foster] Wallace’s work the close attention of a wry, sharp intelligence to a populist pastime, a mix of casual and highfalutin diction, a self-deprecating voice that you’re never sure is totally truthful in its deprecation, and a fondness for broad cultural pronouncements…Whitehead hips us to the popularity and atmosphere of the contemporary game, all without our having to endure a bus trip to Reno or have everything removed from our pockets but the lint.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

• "The Noble Hustle, part love letter, part dark confessional, captures perfectly the mix of neurosis and narrative that makes gambling so appealing.”

  — Mother Jones

• “Clever and entertaining, and Whitehead employs entertaining throw-away lines that make you think.”

  — Miami Herald

• “Whitehead serves up an engrossing mix of casual yet astute reportage and hang-dog philosophizing, showing us that, for all of poker’s intricate calculations and shrewd stratagems, everything still hangs on the turn of a card.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• “As a novelist of considerable range, Whitehead consistently writes about more than he’s ostensibly writing about…here writing a poker book that should strike a responsive literary chord with some who know nothing about the game…Engaging in its color and character.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• "The Noble Hustle, a darkly humorous work of participatory reportage that finds [Whitehead] (a decided amateur) attempting to play poker with the pros…is a hoot…Whitehead proves an ideal observer of poker culture… the tale he tells is much more than that of an odds-against-him novice. It’s a story of a writer befuddled by fatherhood and middle age. Whitehead may not triumph at the tables, but his new book is a winner.”

  — BookPage