It is a rare sports book that can be enjoyed even by those with no serious interest in the sport itself. Mordecai Richler's On Snooker is one such work. While this form of billiards may be a marginal pastime in North America, the award-winning novelist--a self-confessed former "teenage poolroom hustler" in Montreal--brings the game and its players colorfully to life. In the early 1950s Richler relocated to London, the heart of snooker territory, to pursue his writing. Thankfully he wasn't skilled enough with the cue to derail a promising career, but he continued to indulge his other passion by following the enormously popular British snooker competitions, ultimately realizing the sport's literary potential at the end of his life (the book was published posthumously). Subtitled "The Game and the Characters Who Play It," Richler's profiles of the sport's heroes--and villains--are hugely entertaining. Such champions as Alex "The Hurricane" Higgins, Ronnie "The Rocket" O'Sullivan, and Cliff "The Grinder" Thorburn emerge with far more personality than your average professional sportsman. Of Canadian player Bill Werbeniuk (a top 10 player in the early '80s), he writes: "The UK Inland revenue allowed him to claim his legendary intake of beer as tax-deductible.... He had a nervous disorder causing trembling, a disability that could only be suppressed by a measured intake of lager, sometimes running to forty pints a day."

Snooker is the central theme here, but, like a virtuoso jazz sax player, Richler spontaneously riffs on a wide array of topics. These range from the state of the Irish economy to anti-Semitism in sports to the greed of today's athletes. In typically Richlerian style, he even jabs at icon Wayne Gretzky in a digression that castigates champions past their prime as strangers to dignity: "He will do TV promos for just about any product that will have him, except, so far, Tampax." Such is the author's mastery that the reader happily joins the game in all its dimensions without feeling the least bit snookered. --Kerry Doole


From Publishers Weekly
Renowned novelist and lifelong snooker devotee Mordechai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) presents On Snooker, a study of the game's history, development and major players, as well as a lively and amusing personal narrative. Richler's book covers more than a century: from snooker's 1875 inception, as a pastime for British soldiers in India, to its later naming the word is a corruption of the French word for cadet (neux), which derived from its founders' observation that they were all beginners at the game to the author's own covert teenage snooker obsession and hustling endeavors in Montreal. This sports-history-cum-memoir, part of which will be published in the New Yorker, should delight both Richler fans and game enthusiasts. ( July) Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The recently deceased Richler (Barney's Version) was an internationally renowned novelist with a lifelong passion for snooker, an offshoot of billiards. This is his personalized general introduction to the game and its best players. In style it reads like an extended magazine piece on the milieu of the mostly British snooker subculture. The highlights are the descriptions of the players, particularly the less savory ones, but overall the book is haphazardly organized and too often heads off on tangents of questionable appeal. This short work is of interest primarily to fans of snooker or of the author's fiction. John Maxymuk, Robeson Lib., Rutgers Univ., Camden, NJ Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From the Back Cover
Outrageously funny, passionate and thoroughly researched on snooker tables from Montreal's The Main to Dublin, On Snooker is a book that lovers of Richler and of great sports writing will cherish. It is not just a lifelong fan's memoir: it takes us on an entertaining journey through the story and world of snooker, from the odd origins of the game - born the illegitimate child of billiards on a British Indian Army base in the nineteenth century - to the now wildly popular World Championship at the Crucible in Sheffield, England (even at its first televised inception in 1985, 18.5 million viewers stayed up past midnight to watch). On the way we meet the great players - the central figure of the book is Stephen Hendry, probably the most talented snooker player ever - and snooker's bad boy champions. On Snooker is a brilliant, witty and compact look at the game of snooker - past and present - from a masterful storyteller. (6 1/4 x 9 1/4, 214 pages)



About the Author
MORDECAI RICHLER, the author of such distinguished novels as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain's Horseman, and Solomon Gursky Was Here, was born in Montreal in 1931. He has won the Commonwealth Prize, the Paris Review Humor Prize, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay of Duddy Kravitz. Over the years he has contributed to Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Esquire, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Outrageously funny, passionate and thoroughly researched on snooker tables from Montreal's The Main to Dublin, On Snooker is a book that lovers of Richler and of great sports writing will cherish. It is not just a lifelong fan's memoir: it takes us on an entertaining journey through the story and world of snooker, from the odd origins of the game - born the illegitimate child of billiards on a British Indian Army base in the nineteenth century - to the now wildly popular World Championship at the Crucible in Sheffield, England (even at its first televised inception in 1985, 18.5 million viewers stayed up past midnight to watch). On the way we meet the great players - the central figure of the book is Stephen Hendry, probably the most talented snooker player ever - and snooker's bad boy champions. On Snooker is a brilliant, witty and compact look at the game of snooker - past and present - from a masterful storyteller.

SYNOPSIS

Here is an incisive, entertaining look at the game of snooker (a variation on billiards) and those that play it by the critically-acclaimed novelist Mordecai Richler, author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

On Snooker is a brilliant, witty look at the game of snooker--past and present--by one of the world's great novelists. The book explores the odd origins of the game, born the illegitimate child of billiards on a British Indian Army base in the nineteenth century and in 1985, attracting 18.5 million television viewers who stayed up past midnight to watch the World Championship at the Crucible in Sheffield, England.

The central figure of the book is Stephen Hendry, probably the most talented snooker player ever, who recently sought a record-breaking eighth world title. But On Snooker also explores the game's other fascinating characters, from Alex Higgins, Cliff Thorburn (a Canadian and the first non-Brit to win the title), Kirk Stevens, and Jimmy White to Ronnie O'Sullivan. Young O'Sullivan, perhaps the game's most gifted natural talent, is a troubled man; his father, a former porn dealer ("Ron's the name, porn's the game") is serving a life sentence for murder. In addition, Richler visits the craftsman who makes cues for the champions and interviews the agents and groupies who follow the players on the circuit.

The fascinating world of snooker has never been explored with such pith and perception. Like Joyce Carol Oates's book on boxing, On Snooker is a book all lovers of sport and superb sports writing will cherish.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

The recently deceased Richler (Barney's Version) was an internationally renowned novelist with a lifelong passion for snooker, an offshoot of billiards. This is his personalized general introduction to the game and its best players. In style it reads like an extended magazine piece on the milieu of the mostly British snooker subculture. The highlights are the descriptions of the players, particularly the less savory ones, but overall the book is haphazardly organized and too often heads off on tangents of questionable appeal. This short work is of interest primarily to fans of snooker or of the author's fiction. John Maxymuk, Robeson Lib., Rutgers Univ., Camden, NJ Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews