Mark Paul

This book needs to be optioned by some film maker somewhere. Whether it is a Netflix documentary or a major motion picture, this unbelievable account of gamblers who win over $1.25 million on the 1988 Kentucky Derby winner, filly Winning Colors, needs to be optioned. With characters like "Miami Paul" (named after his style of dressing like Don Johnson from Miami Vice), eccentric horse owners (who also own NFL franchises), and Mexican drug cartel leaders (who also own horse tracks in Mexico that may or may not make good on bets that pay out $1.25 million), the reader is sucked into a too-zany-to-be-true narrative. The only drawback for me is that the dialogue is often uninteresting and predictable. Still, the book spins a good yarn. Well worth the read!… (mehr)

This was a fun book about one of my favorite racehorses, and the story of three gamblers who had an adventure betting on her. The book was actually kind of two separate stories--a look at trainer D. Wayne Lukas, owner Gene Klein, and their Kentucky Derby-winning filly Winning Colors, and the tale of Mark "Miami" Paul and his quest to win big on that same Derby in a risky "futures" bet in Mexico that got him into some tight spots. The book is considered "creative nonfiction", because the author freely admits he recreated or invented dialogue and changed a few timelines here and there; but the main events all happened in real life. So the book reads like a novel, and is kind of fictionalized. I get the point of doing that, but personally I prefer either straight nonfiction or a novel; this was kind of a weird mix of the two. I enjoyed all the scenes with racing action and the descriptions of Winning Colors' personality and what it was like to train her and see her blossom into such an amazing racehorse. I also enjoyed getting to know a little bit more about how Lukas' training operation works, and seeing him as a character. There are many colorful quotes in the book about Lukas and his success, from other trainers and jockeys and industry insiders. (Again, why not just write a biography of Lukas and Winning Colors? The author clearly did a lot of research, and provides his many excellent sources in an appendix.) The gambling trio of Miami, Dino, and "Big Bernie" were less fully realized, and this part I think could have been fleshed out into a separate novel all on its own, with more backstory to the gamblers, more of the funny dialogue, and more of an ending--is Ava the fictional version of Miami's real-life wife, or a different person altogether? The way he talks about her suggests he was willing to give up his bachelor ways for her, but we never find out if that's the case. Minor quibbles, I suppose, because overall I enjoyed the book. It was certainly unique, although the title is kind of hyperbole! I was expecting a lot more than what actually happened to the gamblers, but it was still entertaining and suspenseful. And it was awfully cool to get a copy as a gift from Operation Gift Horse on Twitter.… (mehr)

There is this idea we have, about California. It's about 'Hey, it's this so amazing place where they have sushi? And like wine that's better than France?' Judgment of Paris http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89159.Judgment_of_Paris. It's about 'The music is so amazing, it's like Dancing on the Streets.' California Dreamin rel="nofollow" target="_top">http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/754493.California_Dreamin_ You know. Mamma Cass.

It's about admiring people who get really rich really quickly. It's about hey, it so isn't like the rest of the US. Come ooonn!

And yet.....

I had an idea California was something else. Not least because, as I was reading something Manny wrote here recently which referred to the idea that gaol in France isn't so bad as the protagonist has expected; I was remembering a friend who has just come out of Californian gaol. A privatised concern in the middle of the desert, prisoners shackled together as they shuffle along. This was the view that confronted his children when they came to visit.

So when I came upon JEH Smith's piece lately, I was relieved to discover that California isn't actually Mama Cass and Silicon Valley and red wine and film stars living in houses that are too big. Not only, at any rate. It is this:

To be of European descent and from California, by contrast, is somewhat more like being from South Africa. California was simply left blank on early modern maps of the New World, and it remains one of the earth's extremities. Here, just like the Cape, is where one runs out of continent. The fact that the 'Californians' to whom Beattie refers were annihilated, while the 'Hottentots' and other Southern African groups were only subjugated, doesn't make a crucial difference. Like the Boers, most white Californians are descended from people pushed by desperation to the edge of a continent, and, once there, pitted by a white elite against the other races they came across, either as a result of autochthony or through a parallel process of migration.

California generates and sustains its own permanent criminal underclass, largely, it seems, in order to make a perpetual spectacle of cracking down on it, of being tough on it. The criminals are Hispanicized Mestizos, descendants of slaves, and of Dust Bowl migrants (locally dubbed 'Mexican', 'black', and 'white', respectively). The prison system extends far beyond prison walls and into the domestic lives of parolees, of men made to wear signal-transmitting anklets, of everyone whose neighborhood is under constant police supervision not for their own protection but rather in order to keep them thinking of themselves as policed, to keep them conceptualizing themselves in polizeiwissenchaftlich terms as members of a problematic group.

Being policed makes a person into something at once more concrete and abstract: a 'Caucasian individual', a 'black male suspect', and so on. It transforms cars into vehicles and women into females, and generally distorts reality in the name of a supposedly scientific and dispassionate deployment of language. It makes convenient phenotypic identifiers into the outward signs of membership in real kinds: nowhere is race more reified, nowhere is it experienced as more real, than inside a prison, where personal security and survival often can only be assured through membership in a race-based fraternity.

It is true that the California prison system punishes the non-white lower classes with gross disproportion, and even, perhaps, that its very reason for being is to perpetuate, even into the post-Civil Rights era of legal equality, the disenfranchisement and diminished citizenship of African-Americans. But this principal reason has an inseparable corrollary: that it will also perpetuate the perception, among the Harvest Gypsies described by Steinbeck, that they are white and that this comes with certain natural advantages. That these advantages are never quite delivered as promised is the basic betrayal that structures the lives of the Americans I know best. http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2011/06/in-the-valley.html

It is a very moving piece. Read it! It took me to goodreads, no surprise there, and looking around found this book. This took me to Richard's review http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/163450537 which gives links to a whole series in The Economist on the subject. What an unmitigated disaster. I had no idea. The more one reads about the US the harder it is to believe it can extricate itself from the mire. And yet there is still that hope, isn't there?


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