Copyright 1992 Guardian Newspapers Limited The Guardian

January 23, 1992

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 24

LENGTH: 595 words

HEADLINE: CHIPS WITH EVERYTHING;
Paperbacks

BYLINE: AFSHIN RATTANSI

BODY:

The Biggest Game In Town, by Al Alvarez (Oldcastle, pounds 5.95)

ALVAREZ writes about the culture of a town built on the throw of dice. He is analysing the American dream when he tells us that it is not trees or buildings that rise from the desert when you reach Las Vegas. It is electric signs.

Alvarez has a sportswriter's knack of evoking the excitement of particular games. Among these card-by-card commentaries are professionals extolling the virtues of betting everything on each successive hand, in one instance to transform $ 40 into $ 20,000 in a few hours.

The chronicle of the Poker World Series, where a pot of nearly $ 1 million sat between the last two players, is especially engrossing. As players are knocked out, Alvarez lays bare their secure grasp of unreality. In one case, a retiring accountant from London loses home and family to the addiction of kitsch hotel card halls and prostitutes. "In less than a year he had been transformed from a walk-on uncle in Goodbye, Columbus into a tormented Dostoevskian, weeping helplessly on the sofa while his whore tore up bank notes and threw them on the fire."

And the conclusions of Alvarez's stint in Vegas? Those who begin with the most chips are more likely to win. And for every winner there is a loser.

Black Athena, by Martin Bernal (Vintage, pounds 8.99)

THE long-awaited publication of the second volume of Martin Bernal's Black Athena also sees a reissue of the controversial first volume in paperback. Whatever the final verdict on its thesis of proto-Afroasiatic as the origin of later languages, it provides a brilliant reconstruction of the racist and anti-Semitic contest in which current assumptions about "the wonder that was Greece" took shape. Flaubert, De Tocqueville, Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy all make unexpected and discomfiting appearances.

Breaking the spell of that particular "myth of Hellas" that has held the European imagination in its grip for two centuries may be indispensable amid the challenges of the post-imperial age. Both exciting and accessible, Bernal has performed his task with great courage, ruffling the feathers of classicists, linguists and historians the world over.

The Crooked Timber Of Humanity, by Isaiah Berlin (Fontana, pounds 5.99)

IT TAKES a Berlin to discover Immanuel Kant's aphorism, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made". But Berlin's hallmarks have always been range and insight rather than prescription. In this first book for many years, he marshals a stockpile of ammunition to bolster a pessimistic thesis.

The foundations are laid down in an essay which damns all forms of Utopianism and opts instead for "promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium". It is a vision of society that he concedes may not appeal to the young. But, he points out, quoting an American philosopher, there is no reason why truth, when discovered, should prove interesting.

It's the prose of a breathtaking stylist and savant that makes the journey to such a limp and perverse conclusion worthwhile. Apart from the essays tracing the decline of Utopian ideas in the West is a spectacular analysis of the ideas of Joseph de Maistre, usually thought of as little more than a reactionary Catholic aristocrat. Berlin shows the 18th-century thinker to have his finger on the pulse of a world inching towards holocausts.

Berlin's greatness lies in his fiery desconstructionist gaze and the precision with which he unlocks the past and enters the minds of his protaganists.