Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This instantly engrossing coming-of-age memoir/cautionary tale from humor writer Fenton (Truth or Tabloid?) details the author's teenage years in 1960s Detroit among the swindling, money-hungry environs of the carnival midway. The largely ignored son of an alcoholic WWII veteran, Fenton blows off an opportunity to become his high school's football quarterback, preferring to hang out with his classmate Jackie Barron and Jackie's shifty family's traveling carnival operation. Fenton is impressed with Jackie's exceptional manipulation skills, and once Fenton demonstrates an uncanny knack for numbers and memorization at Jackie's illegal basement casino, the two become inseparable. The well-paced story heats up as Fenton flees his rocky home life to work for Jackie and gets an education in the intricate chicanery of carnival work, shoplifting and wooing women. After months on the lower rung of carnival duty in Cleveland, Fenton discovers Jackie's been cheating him out of his fair share, so Fenton begins skimming cash from the games he operates. And when a new manager promotes Fenton to the higher stakes scams, Fenton and Jackie's friendship turns intensely competitive. This spirited story of obsession with the carnival's "alternating current of greed-fed euphoria and paranoia" is at once entertaining and informative. Agent, Brian DeFiore. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
While most teenage boys in 1960s rural Mineralton, MI, were collecting chump change mowing lawns and delivering the Detroit Free Press, young Mensa inductee Fenton, under the tutelage of fellow classmate and grifter extraordinaire Jackie Barron, was amassing a carnival curriculum vitae and fortune as a carny huckster with Barron's Party Time Shows. This autobiographical portrait of the con artist as a young man is as delightful as it is revealing of the seamy midway underbelly. Having served a 15-year stint as a tabloid reporter for the National Enquirer (an appropriate career move), Fenton is an amusing storyteller who punctuates his tales with carny carnage, slang, and compelling portraits of rogues. He has written a contemporary carnival classic in the vein of Nell Stroud's Josser and Howard Bone's Side Show: My Life with Geeks, Freaks & Vagabonds in the Carny Trade. Public librarians, "come on in, it's time to win"-just keep one hand on your wallet.-Barry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Good student, quarterback, and all-around good guy in his early high school days, Fenton was easily pictured moving on to college and a nice middle-class job and family. But in his junior year, a fellow student barreled into his life and changed its course. Jackie Barron came from a family of carnival owners and con artists, and recognizing Fenton's skill with numbers, he enlisted his aid in setting up a casino for high school kids in his basement. Fenton learned the basics: counting cards, bribing cops to look the other way, letting someone win from time to time, and the most important rule of any gambling system-stack the odds so that the house always wins. Using the seed money from the basement endeavor, Barron took over a carnival midway. Fenton followed, seduced by promises of wealth, women, and fun. After slugging away at the low-end games, he worked his way up. His internship of sorts placed him under the tutelage of men named the Ghost and Horserace Harry. From them he learned the art of the con: how to reel the people in, how not to scare them off, and, most importantly, how to get as much money from them as possible. In a scene worthy of a movie, Fenton battles Barron in a one-day, winner-take-all contest on the midway to prove who is the better con man. Witty and irreverent, this memoir is filled with enough quips, tricks, and scams to satisfy even the shortest attention spans.-Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Forget Las Vegas: you'll never even beat the midway at the local carnival, says Fenton, who worked the circuit as a high-schooler. Fenton went on to be a reporter for The National Enquirer and to write a couple of humor books, but in the 1960s he was a bright kid with an unhappy home life. That made him an easy mark for schoolmate Jackie Brown, a student of the art of the swindle who declared, " . . . every game on the midway . . . is all about science and the unchangeable laws of nature." Impressed by Fenton's ease with math, Brown took the boy under his wing and offered a tutorial in the ways of gambling. Fenton took to this line of work, which opened for a shy kid a world of thrills and, not incidentally, sex. Limning numerous episodes of deceit with the immediacy and clarity of a pure raconteur, he tells of moving up through the carny ranks from the floating-duck games to the genuine gambling venues. Carnies are as ready to ding their coworkers as they are the folks at the show, he notes; he cheated his boss for the same reason his boss had cheated him: because "as a general rule any carny who wasn't an ignorant fool simply held out his rightful percentage, the one that God had ordained when he'd written the chapter on carnies in the Holy Bible." Eventually, the author came to realize how easy it was to become "an asshole carny," always ready to shaft the next character with too loose a grip on the weekly earnings. A metaphorical shoot-out ensued with his mentor, then Fenton headed off to the noble world of the University of Michigan. Well, not really. A week into the first semester, he again heard the call to the midway. From there it was an obvious next step to the tabloids. The strange, dark side of life, but a very real milieu. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
