Poker Nation: A High-Stakes, Low-Life Adventure into the Heart of a Gambling Country starts out with a great hook. The author is playing Texas Hold'em at a dingy New York City (illegal) poker club and gets Oldsmobile clubs in his pocket. Then the flop comes and he's looking at a gut shot for a straight, which comes on the turn card. But then the river card is the Jack of Spades and suddenly he's into a nut flush. He's feeling pretty good until another player taps him - goes all-in - and our author starts to wonder if he's been dealt a bad beat with quads. Andy calls and...

Well, you have to wait until the end of the book, which is why I read the whole thing in two days. (I won't reveal what happened) In between, Andy Bellin serves up a behind-the-scenes travelogue of poker games stretching from L.A. to NYC, with many side trips to Vegas. There's also a lot of autobiography, basic strategy, and the human drama of gamblers who are up, up, up, then very far down.

This book is definitely a mixed bag. If you want to join in on the heartbreak of a bad beat, or the alternate thrill of a hard-won win, those chapters are enthralling. When Bellin drifts into his days in and out of graduate school, I quickly lost interest and started skimming. I found the writing a little pedestrian - which is surprising considering Bellin did a stint at the Paris Review - but maybe a more charitable adjective is "accessible." Bellin is trying to reach an audience as broad as the characters found in his book (ministers, stockbrokers, bookies) so he's keeping the prose as unvarnished as the felt on a poker table. On the whole, I could only recommend half the book, but as soon as I finished, I started to wonder where I put my cards and whether there was a game somewhere with a chair open for me.