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Title: Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck by Ricky Jay, Rosamond Wolff Purcell ISBN: 0-9714548-1-7 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: December, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A pleasant appetizer
Comment: This is a thin hardbound volume, a collection of photographs and short
discourses about various aspects of dice, gambling, and fraud. Each
chapter is very short (just a few pages) and the entire book can be
read in less than thirty minutes. Both the photographs and the text
are fascinating, and left this reader wanting more. I hope that Mr.
Jay will be writing more books to share his voluminous and interesting
knowledge of magic, gaming, and cons with the world. (Jay's other
books: Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women and Jay's
Journal of Anomalies are also highly recommended.)
Rating: 4
Summary: The Magic Behind Ancient Tools of Fortune
Comment: Associeted with "good luck", dice have long had their solid place in the line of objects revered by people captivated by supersticions as well as by "die" hard gamblers. -- Lucky to those whose fortunes have been increased by the magical cubes, unlucky to those who have been destroyed by the overwhelming losses derived from their addiction to tempt Lady Luck. Then of course there is the chapter on "loaded" dice, the term familar even to the most respectable of gamblers.
For most, a pair of dice is associated with friendly parlour games (Monopoly, Sorry! et al), while others see "money" and flashy Las Vegas neon signs when shown these magically dotted cubes. The scientific roots of the magic behind the cubed die, as ingenious as it appears is purely mathematical. First grade students learn the "rule" regarding where exactly to place the respective "numbers" on the cube (top and bottom always adding to 7). The countless symbolic and logical aspects of dice are outlined in this engaging text. A fierce opponent of gambling, I nonetheless respect the research and well explained findings in Ricky Jay's book. An intriguing scientific read!
Rating: 5
Summary: Dying Dice
Comment: Though they may have passed the peak of their fad, fuzzy dice can still be seen hanging from the rear view mirrors of favored cars. They are an amusing bit of American folk surrealism, recalling the more official artworks of the fur-lined cup and saucer or the lobster telephone. The furry dice don't clack the way real dice do, and they are too huge and too rotund ever to be useful as mechanisms in games of chance. Yet they look strange enough that many people fancy them, and assembly lines somewhere are tuned up to produce them for enthusiasts. Conversely, there are real dice depicted in _Dice: Deception, Fate, & Rotten Luck_ (Quantuck Lane Press) by Ricky Jay, with photographs by Rosamond Purcell. But some of them are startlingly furry, and all of them are dying.
Ricky Jay is a magician, and a historian of magic, in addition to being a stage and movie actor. He has produced a couple of large books having to do with the history of magic and showmanship, but this is a small book, square like a face of a die, as are the color close-ups of the afflicted dice. "In the attempt to acquire empirical knowledge, I have accumulated thousands of dice over a period of decades," Jay explains. They are of all sorts of colors and patterns, but most of them are made of celluloid, the same celluloid whose decay has robbed us of countless early movies. Rosamond Purcell specializes in photographing the entropy that overcomes inanimate objects, like a book eaten by termites or rusting objects from the junkyard. Most of the large photographs here show the dice larger than life. The styles of their degeneration are diverse. The transparent ones show cracks through their mass, as if they have been dropped from a height. Some of the faces have crystallized, so that they look as if they have been sugared. Greenish mold seems to grow on some of them, while others seem to be bubbling from inside. Some of them have become as floppy as Dali's pocket watches, while others cleave crisply, leaving cubic fracture lines. Sometimes the spots are preserved, and sometimes it is the spots that have been attacked by time. They are certainly more interesting and more photogenic than they would have been when they were first manufactured.
It is to be expected that the text, in twelve small chapters numbered by pips on the dice, reflects Jay's wit and erudition. Here you can learn a lot of dice history, tales of loaded dice found in Pompeii, or of the conjuring dwarf who had no arms or legs, but manipulated dice in subtle ways. You can read about how God has struck down sacrilegious gamesters. Here is the legend of the Scandinavian kings throwing dice for territory, each throwing repeated boxcars until a surprising stroke (consistent with these pictures) gives a throw that beats a twelve. These are all good stories of the importance which many have felt for dice and their outcomes, and they are made poignant by the handsome photographs of just how chance and time have overtaken these humble cubes.
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Title: Jay's Journal of Anomalies by Ricky Jay ISBN: 1593720009 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women by Ricky Jay ISBN: 0374525706 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: November, 1998 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear by Jim Steinmeyer ISBN: 0786712260 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Owls Head by Rosamond Wolff Purcell ISBN: 0971454868 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 11 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Tricks with Your Head : Hilarious Magic Tricks and Stunts to Disgust and Delight by Mark Levy, Mac King ISBN: 0609805916 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 26 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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