The Burning: A Novel
 
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From Publishers Weekly Writing about gambling, chance and fate, Legendre takes a bold risk, wagering an enjoyable if predictable bloke-lit debut against the egghead novel of ideas that it becomes--and he pulls it off. Fresh out of graduate school, economist Logan Smith joins a couple of friends for a weekend in Las Vegas, where he falls for troubled, needy blackjack dealer Dallas Cole. A few months later, Logan is a professor at Arizona State University, and Dallas is his uneasy new wife. Moving from the trials of a marriage's first year to the rarified world of academia, Legendre makes Logan's life of the mind every bit as stimulating as the human drama that surrounds it, providing Logan's neo-Marxist theories with resonance and real stakes. Legendre's fully realized characters, longing for something other than what they have--other lovers, other careers, other political realities--render vividly the weight of American yearning. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Logan Smith has just finished his doctoral dissertation in economics and decides to unwind in Vegas. There he meets beautiful blackjack dealer Dallas, who gives the naive Logan a few instructive tips on the game and, later, further guidance in the bedroom. Less than two years later, the newlyweds settle in Arizona, where Logan has been hired to teach. He also devotes himself to refining his radical challenge to neoclassical economics. As he becomes absorbed by his work and his intellectually stimulating conversations with an alluring astrophysicist, the volatile, complicated Dallas develops a serious gambling problem. In this remarkably assured debut, Legendre weds a provocative novel of ideas to an affecting story of romantic trials and tribulations. It is a testament to his considerable narrative skill that he makes equally compelling reading out of scenes depicting the academic debate among dueling economists and scenes of a desperate Dallas gambling away the couple's life savings. Muscular prose and heady intellectual banter combine in this exceptionally fine debut. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Submitted On:

09 Sep 2007

File Author:

Legendre, Thomas

File Size:

2.33 MB