Poker Man's Gamble, Happiness as History, Parisian Luck: Books

Poker Man's Gamble, Happiness as History, Parisian Luck: Books

Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Novelist James McManus understands odds. A semiprofessional poker player, he described his fifth-place finish in the 2000 World Series of Poker in ``Positively Fifth Street.''

McManus also knows the deck is stacked against him when it comes to his health. His family has a history of heart attacks, he says: ``Each drag off a spliff or a cigarette, each mouthful of garlic mashed potatoes or Billecart-Salmon brut deducts x minutes, y seconds'' from his life, he writes in his memoir ``Physical'' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 253 pages, $24).

After turning 52, McManus checked into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for an ``executive'' check-up. For $8,484.25, doctors gave him a colonoscopy, dermatological and eye exams, blood and urine tests, a full-body scan and counseling. He was ``reamed, steamed and dry cleaned,'' and told to curtail his bad habits, he writes.

Yet McManus persists in his mostly sedentary, indulgent lifestyle, knowing he's lessening his chances of seeing either of his two pre-teen daughters ``speak as valedictorian of her law-school class, get married, score her first goal.''

Such reflections aside, this book is no ode to middle-aged regret. McManus's overarching aesthetic is macho sarcasm: He even fantasizes that the Mayo nurses will turn him into an S&M sex slave. Nor does he shy from intimate topics, such as his 22-year-old son's suicide and whether he should get a vasectomy.

Stem-Cell Gaffe

Throughout, McManus sustains a healthy skepticism of the medical edifice, questioning, for example, whether anti-depressants helped drive his son over the edge. Yet he also offers praise where it's due, particularly to the Mayo, a not-for-profit institution.

McManus's only major gaffe comes when he discusses his 30-year- old daughter's diabetes, which he believes might be cured through advances in stem-cell research. Turning polemic, the author excoriates the U.S. government for curtailing such research and lionizes South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk who in 2004 claimed to have cloned a human embryo and extracted stem cells from it. Oops. In December, Hwang disclosed that his claim was ``faked,'' undermining the author's argument.

`Happiness: A History'

McManus is a shrewd hedonist: He wants to balance fun with virtue. Yet it would be unfair to dismiss him as a frat-boy philosopher. Similar concerns have occupied thinkers through the ages, says Darrin McMahon in his prosaic, yet edifying ``Happiness: A History'' (Atlantic Monthly, 542 pages, $27.50).

The author surveys competing strains of Western thought on ``what constitutes the good life,'' starting with Plato and Aristotle and ending with Samuel Beckett and psychopharmacology.

The word ``happiness'' derives from the Middle English and Old Norse word ``happ,'' meaning chance or luck, writes McMahon, a history professor at Florida State University. For the Greeks, happiness was a gift from the gods. It remained in the hands of the divine until the Enlightenment, when humans took responsibility.

Unfortunately this did as much bad as good, writes McMahon, as evidenced by the Nazis and other murderous political movements of the 20th century. This ``dark side'' of the human pursuit of happiness produces suffering, rather than alleviating it.

Surprised by Joy

Sometimes joy is unanticipated. Jeremy Mercer, a Canadian crime reporter, was on the run from a death threat when he landed in Paris just days before the city center was packed with millennium revelers on the last night of 1999.

In his memoir ``Time Was Soft There'' (St. Martin's, 260 pages, $23.95), Mercer describes how one day, broke and walking the streets, he ducked into Shakespeare & Co., the beloved English-language bookstore opposite Notre Dame. He was invited upstairs for tea and soon after moved into the building for a five-month stay.

Shakespeare & Co. is known to anyone who's gone to Paris to find his inner Hemingway. Originally owned by Sylvia Beach, who published James Joyce's ``Ulysses,'' the shop was closed during World War II. It reopened in 1951, under the ownership of American George Whitman, an avowed Communist who wound up installing 13 beds upstairs and giving lodging to some 40,000 wandering writers in 54 years.

Mercer assisted the 92-year-old Whitman with customers. Otherwise, the rent was modest: Make your bed every morning, treat the other eccentric residents kindly and read a book a day -- preferably something by Bernard Malamud or Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In the denouement, Mercer repays George by reuniting him with his estranged daughter. This is a heartfelt paean to literary dreamers and the unique charm of that magical place.