From The Connecticut Post

October 27, 1009

 

 

 

"Pomerantz brings their stories together in a fascinating social, political and sexual history."


For the past year Nina Sankovitch, of Westport, Ct., has been polishing off one book every day and blogging about it at www.readallday.org. The experience has brought Sankovitch admiring e-mails from all over the world and boxes with suggested books for review from major publishers.

As she races to the homestretch of this project -- Sankovitch will review her 365th book on Wednesday -- the blogger says she has been too busy reading and writing to have the time to begin to put the experience into perspective.

Sankovitch didn't want the project to feel like a long homework assignment, so she used a loose and eclectic method of picking the books.

The blogger didn't start out with a list of 365 "great" books to read. Instead, she took suggestions from friends, from the staff at the Westport Library -- basically any enthusiastic reader.

"I check out the new releases table at the library, people give me books, and I took lots of recommendations," she said.

As a result, the readallday.org list includes classics, popular fiction, mysteries, memoirs, and graphic novels.

Taking a brief break from her project last week, Sankovitch said the experience has given her a whole new appreciation for the intimate communication between a writer and his or her readers. The project began as a way for Sankovitch to try to come to terms with her sister's death; she has found some solace in the mysterious way that a book connects the minds of two people who will never meet in person.

Sankovitch's sister -- who died four years ago at the age of 46 -- was a voracious reader. "She was too young to die. She loved to read. I am fulfilling maybe even a fraction of the reading she should have had left to her. But I am not only reading to compensate, I am reading to endure," she wrote on her blog.

On August 11, 2009, she read The Devil's Tickets.

Here is her review:

The Devil's Tickets by Gary M. Pomerantz is a marvelous book about the game of bridge (the Puritans called playing cards the devil's tickets) and the enterprise of marriage. The rules for both changed in the early half of the twentieth century, especially in America, and Pomerantz examines the connection between the wild popularity of bridge and the newly accepted sexuality and intelligence of women to explain what he calls "a new American age." American capitalist energy, illustrated in the story of how one man infused bridge with sex and power to reach thousands of housebound and frustrated women and guarantee himself fame and riches, and American temper, told through the story of one fateful night of bridge and a bid gone wrong, resulting in murder, combine in this story of five couples and their marriages, unions that end in death or divorce but never in happily ever after.

In discussing bridge and marriage, the similarities are compelling: partners must work in union but not as mirrors of each other but rather as complements, each with their own role; communication is key but rarely straightforward, instead existing through coded expressions, unexpressed but implicit desires, and established patterns; and the final victory, though shared, is rarely evenly divided. Marriage, like bridge, builds on power struggles, frustrations, resentments, and ecstasies, as well as on shared beliefs and strategies. And finally, the magic of both marriage and bridge is just that, magic, unexplainable but profound. Pomerantz asks the question, Is there such a thing as a "perfect partnership"? In bridge or in marriage?

Certainly not in the five couples of the book, Myrtle Bennett and her husband Jack, whom she murders over a bridge game; Ely and Jo Culbertson who made bridge a national craze but Ely's megalomania drove his family into misery and dysfunction; Lura and Jim Reed, older wife supporting her younger husband's national political ambitions; Jim Reed and Nell Donnelly, the mistress and mother of his child whom he married once Lura finally died; and Nell and Paul Donnelly, her first husband whom she outshone in every way, including business acumen and sexual appetite, and whom she dumped the instant Jim was free of Lura.

Women in the first half of the twentieth century were freed from many household tasks, and gaining control over their sexual, political, and financial lives. At the same time, men were still hanging onto notions of superiority over and protectiveness (infantilization) of "their" women. Bridge brought men and women together over a table of equality, with repercussions felt far from the unfolded card table. A good companion book for this history is the novel by Heywood Broun, The Sun Field, which portrayed the evolving relationship between the sexes in 1920s New York (Heywood Broun is actually mentioned in The Devil's Tickets, along with Babe Ruth, fictionalized in The Sun Field).

The Devil's Tickets is dense, full, and rich (just take a look at Pomerantz's bibliography to see how much research went into this book). It is well-written and engrossing, flowing with information and insights and good old story-telling to mesh the stories of the five couples masterfully. Pomerantz brings their stories together in a fascinating social, political and sexual history.