On Snooker: A Brilliant Exploration of the Game and the Characters Who Play It.
by By Richler, Mordecai
Category: Sports & Recreation , Essays

Long before he became a writer, Mordecai Richler fell in love with snooker, risking God's wrath by spending Friday evenings at the Laurier pool hall and concluding that "snooker was a hell of a lot more fun than Talmud classes with Mr. Yalofsky in a back room of the Young Israel Synagogue." In this homage to the snooker subculture Richler's last book he looks at his own passion for the game as well as that of the hustlers, prodigies, and others who devote their lives to it. Richler fills out his observations with historic morsels (for instance, the fact that Pushkin, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Conrad, and Dostoyevsky all managed to squeeze at least a mention of billiards into their work). Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)