The Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas
The seasonal madness of the NCAA basketball tournament played against the ongoing folly that is Las Vegas: it’s hard to find a more combustible admixture in sports, but Zaremba, a communications professor at Northeastern University, conveys it all with cool wit. His idea: travel to Vegas two days before the 2007 tournament and write a six-day diary of what he observes among the various casinos and their “sports books,” those auditoriums where gamblers (fans, really) can watch dozens of games while placing a range of bets. Zaremba can’t resist laying down bets himself—his “research” confirms for him yet again, for instance, that he can lose a lot of money quickly at the blackjack table—yet he is detached enough to explain how the system works and to record the events and singular characters as they reveal themselves. Although the action takes place in Las Vegas, the book makes it easy to extrapolate this subtext of March Madness playing itself out nationwide. A sleeper of a book.