Positively Fifth Street : Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker

Rating:
Summary: Long winded, Tiring.
Review: When the author decides to stick to one subject the book isnt bad. But going off on multi-page tangents that add little to the story really gets tiring. The WSOP related stuff was good, the murder stuff was ok, the other 150 pages are just excruciating. Unfortunately for the reader they are all entertwined so to get one you have to go through all.

IMHO, I thought the author was trying to copy Alvarez's (Biggest Game in Town) style, but where Alvarez would go off on a paragraph or two to fill in a story, this author would go on for pages.

Rating:
Summary: Were it not for the narrator...
Review: The author is sterling when he decides to discuss the Binion murder and its outcome. He possesses a wonderful knowledge of poker and illuminates his readers considerably through the facts and history that he shares. His success in the tournament is admirable and rather amazing.

Unfortunately, he teases us with the Binion Las Vegas Confidential angle intermittently throughout the book. Its 400 page length becomes excruciating as his need to discuss himself overpowers his desire to tell a tale. In the end we get a bit of a muddle.

Yet, overall, the book is definitely worth reading and informative even if McManus is one of the most self-indulgent writers I've ever encountered. His constant personalizations ("Bad Jim"/"Good Jim") are pure torture. He is not nearly as interesting as the coverage assignment he received from Harpers.

This is really an autobiography of a sensitive, New Age academic who appears to have completely bought into feminism, post-modernism, chic leftism, multiculturalism, and every other theory to come out of the narcissistic 1960s. Had he merely given a journalistic account of the murder and the WSOP tournament in 200 pages I would have given him, in good faith, five stars for his effort, but his self-fascination degrades the product at every turn.

Mr. McManus is a novelist and a writing instructor which is evident in his extensive vocabulary and occasional witty turn of phrase. Yet he seems to use extraneous metaphor after extraneous metaphor in chapter after chapter. Indeed, the thing that is most characteristic of "Positively Fifth Street" is its overwriting. Is someone who takes 500 words to say what he could in 50 really a great writer? I don't think so.