A gloriously written memoir of growing up in a family of hard- core gamblers-Martha Frankel thought the gambling gene had passed her by, until she found herself addicted to online poker and knee-deep in debt.

Most weekends when Martha Frankel was a kid, her mother had a mah-jongg game going in the kitchen with her girlfriends while their husbands were in the living room playing poker. Once Frankel reached adulthood, however, while her cousins were making their way in the world as bookies and drug dealers, gambling didn't much factor into her life.

In the tradition of Five-Finger Discount by Helene Stapinski and Dry by Augusten Burroughs, Hats and Eyeglasses traces Frankel's love affair with poker. It was a passion that bit her in her mid-forties and remained harmless enough when she stuck to real cards. But everything changed one evening in 1998 in Atlantic City, when Frankel overheard one dealer bemoan the fact that his tips that evening were going to be small what with the meager crowd assembled. Another dealer mentioned that everyone must be playing online-"Why leave the house when you can play in your pajamas?" the dealer said. Why indeed? thought Frankel, who couldn't wait to get back to her computer. The next morning she took a deep breath, typed in her credit card number, and entered the world of online gambling. It was the beginning of what one of her uncles called "hats and eyeglasses," a term used to describe those times when you're losing so bad you're drowning (so all one can see is the poker player's hat and eyeglasses floating on the surface of the water). By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Hats and Eyeglasses is a tale of passion, addiction-and those times in life when we almost lose our shirt.

"A soft-pedaling memoir by journalist Frankel fondly recalls growing up in the Bronx and Queens, N.Y., learning to play poker from her dad and uncles, which would later become her obsession. As a kid Frankel absorbed the numbers-canny ways of her relatives, who doled out gambling advice such as the reference in the title to a ship's sinking, leaving only hats and eyeglasses floating on the surface. With the death of her beloved father, known as the Pencil because he was a CPA, Frankel's big dreams deflated and she largely drifted through school, a first marriage and drug use, before meeting woodworker Steve. She moved to Woodstock, N.Y., and, through friends, began writing celebrity interviews for magazines like Details. An idea for writing a screenplay about a poker player brought her into close contact with her ex-con cousin Keith, who had taught her how to play. From regular Wednesday night poker games with her friend Sal's group of hard-pickled males, where she learned how not to play 'like a girl,' to an all-poker cruise to casinos in Atlantic City, N.J., and L.A., she gravitated to playing online, which enthralled her — and emptied her bank account. As she explains in this frank and unaffected memoir, shame brought her back to her family and closer to her mother." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Two classes of people generally are forgotten amid the plethora of televised poker shows and their ubiquitous professionals: the anonymous millions who almost always lose, and the handful of casino owners who never do, making fortunes separating the masses from their money. When the border between recreation and addiction is porous, there are men waiting to exploit it.

Martha Frankel... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) may not be a prototypical member of the faceless players who flood casinos, card rooms and online gambling sites, but her memoir, 'Hats & Eyeglasses,' is at once funny, disturbing and likely familiar to many who have lived in the grip of obsession. Growing up in a Jewish family in the Bronx and Queens, Frankel was first drawn to the mystery and masculinity of poker as she watched her father's weekly low-stakes game with an ensemble of neighborhood characters. (Her mother would wipe the floor with all of them on the rare occasions she chose to play.)

Though poker was part of the familial landscape, Frankel's urge to play hit later in life, after she was married and establishing her career interviewing celebrities for magazines. She browbeat a friend to join his weekly, all-guy game, where she began to master the finer points of strategy and to deploy her powers of observation, gift for banter and feminine wiles to serious advantage. With a twinkle-in-her-eye, devil-in-your-ear personality, she possessed poker's rarest advantage: No one minded losing to her very much.

Soon she was spending whole days on her couch dealing out practice hands to learn every possible situation. She turned down work assignments worth thousands of dollars, if they meant missing the weekly game, where she might have made $85 on a good night. 'There's something about winning against those guys that makes me feel really accomplished,' she writes, and in this nearly throwaway line Frankel isolates poker's special narcotic: Because the game involves far more skill and guile than chance, the intellectual conquest is more intoxicating than the money.

Frankel soon expanded her game to out-of-the-way card rooms, casinos and eventually the seductive convenience of online play, which nearly destroyed her. Her natural talents — being able to read other players and to fool them with her charm — are meaningless on a computer. The resulting downward spiral — financial loss, emotional withdrawal and lying to friends and family — will ring true for anyone dealing with addiction, though her eventual recovery seems a bit easy in the telling.

Still, to read 'Hats & Eyeglasses' is to want to get to know Frankel, to hear her tell even more rollicking tales than the book reveals, and especially to play poker with her. For low stakes, of course.

When the masses gamble, someone else hits it big. But unlike the gangsters who defined the first modern era of Las Vegas in the 1950s and '60s, the moguls behind today's mecca of excess operate in relative obscurity. In 'Winner Takes All,' veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Christina Binkley chronicles how Steve Wynn and Kirk Kerkorian led the charge to blow up Vegas (literally) to save it. Aging hotels were replaced by outlandish towers of alternate reality, evoking Egypt, Paris, New York and Venice. Cirque du Soleil became a fixture, top chefs and high-end retailers were brought in, and Vegas boomed once again. 'By 1991, every Las Vegas casino needed to be slathered with a theme — heavy on the schmaltz, hold the irony,' Binkley writes.

But it is Gary Loveman, the least known and latest on the scene, who is the real revolutionary in Binkley's important and detailed account. For all of Kerkorian's financial derring-do and Wynn's mad design visions (even as he is slowly going blind), they compete for a similar group of high-roller customers seeking ever-escalating luxury. An economist by training, Loveman found gold in the rest of us and transformed the industry.

Loveman, who ultimately took over the Harrah's chain, shunned Vegas at first, concentrating instead on the boom in riverboat casinos around the country. These were his laboratories for pioneering sophisticated research and marketing techniques to separate more gamblers from more of their money. For instance, Harrah's gamblers must now register before they can play. They then receive 'loyalty' cards that are required to buy chips or slot-machine tokens, helping the casino track their every move. Not doing well at the slots? The casino knows, and soon sends someone to make you feel better with a voucher for a free meal or another perk. Now you'll stay longer, and probably lose more.

Once you're home, lots of mail will arrive enticing you back, with free hotel rooms or whatever Harrah's experts have determined you'll want. Binkley vividly conveys the repulsiveness of the scene, but as with train wrecks, you just can't stop looking. Or reading."

Reviewed by Jonathan Krim, who is an assistant managing editor at washingtonpost.com and plays a lot of poker, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[This] Honest, funny betting memoir rises to the top... Frankel's lively storytelling allows her to turn her own crapola into a winner."

USA Today

"In five minutes you will feel not only as if you have known [Martha] all your life, but as if you still have one of her sweaters."

The New York Times

"Intimate, exuberant"

O, The Oprah Magazine

"Sparse and honest writing"

The Associated Press

"Fast-paced and amazingly funny"

New Orleans Times-Picayune

"[A] frank and unaffected memoir"

Publishers Weekly

"Fearlesspowerful, even uplifting and funny."

The New York Post

"Fun and full of life. I've known Martha Frankel for twenty years and Hats and Eyeglasses was still surprising. A wonderful book."
-Jane Smiley, author of Ten Days in the Hills and A Year at the Races

"A bluntly honest memoir of gambling addiction-harrowing, funny, and compulsively readable, straight through to the end."
-John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The City of Falling Angels

"Hats and Eyeglasses is a hamische tour de force. With a warm voice and a light touch, Martha Frankel's account of growing up with gambling pays off, big- time. My bet is on her as she both enshrines and kicks her compulsion. Entertaining and enlightening, this is a must for memoir addicts, and a fine debut for the author."
-Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangements and Beautiful Bodies

Martha Frankel is an entertainment journalist.