In American Roulette, Richard Marcus tells his never-before-heard story, of ripping off casinos. The book follows Marcus, along with several of the world's great professional casino cheaters, as he travels from Las Vegas to London and Monte Carlo, pilfering large sums of money from casinos by performing sleight of hand magic tricks with gaming chips. As skilled cheaters, they back up their moves with psychological setups to convince pit bosses that they're watching legitimate high rollers getting lucky, while in fact they're being ripped off blind. With the exploding growth of casino gambling, heightened by Indian reservation and riverboat expansion, more and more elaborate casino cheaters are illegally assaulting the green-felt, getting rich off of novice casino personnel. Richard Marcus's insider story is a window into the hidden world of intriguing personalities and tense situations he encounters as a member of expert casino-cheating teams who use their wits to turn the odds upside down and "earn" millions. American Roulette is a fascinating story not only for those who occasionally casino-gamble, but for everyone with a little larceny in their heart.

As the death penalty clings to life in many states and dies off in others, this first-of-its-kind ethnography takes readers inside capital trials across the United States. Sarah Beth Kaufman draws on years of ethnographic and documentary research, including hundreds of hours of courtroom observation in seven states, interviews with participants, and analyses of newspaper coverage to reveal how the American justice system decides who deserves the most extreme punishment. The “super due process” accorded capital sentencing by the United States Supreme Court is the system’s best attempt at individuated sentencing. Resources not seen in most other parts of the criminal justice system, such as jurors and psychological experts, are required in capital trials, yet even these cannot create the conditions of morality or justice. Kaufman demonstrates that capital trials ultimately depend on performance and politics, resulting in the enactment of deep biases and utter capriciousness. American Roulette contends that the liberal, democratic ideals of criminal punishment cannot be enacted in the current criminal justice system, even under the most controlled circumstances.

An analysis of the culture of gambling from an insider's perspective follows the author's travels alongside some of the world's greatest casino cheaters to such locations as Las Vegas, London, and Monte Carlo.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus comes the first effort to set the Cuban Missile Crisis, with its potential for nuclear holocaust, in a wider historical narrative of the Cold War—how such a crisis arose, and why at the very last possible moment it didn't happen. In this groundbreaking look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Sherwin not only gives us a riveting sometimes hour-by-hour explanation of the crisis itself, but also explores the origins, scope, and consequences of the evolving place of nuclear weapons in the post-World War II world. Mining new sources and materials, and going far beyond the scope of earlier works on this critical face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union—triggered when Khrushchev began installing missiles in Cuba at Castro's behest—Sherwin shows how this volatile event was an integral part of the wider Cold War and was a consequence of nuclear arms. Gambling with Armageddon looks in particular at the original debate in the Truman Administration about using the Atomic Bomb; the way in which President Eisenhower relied on the threat of massive retaliation to project U.S. power in the early Cold War era; and how President Kennedy, though unprepared to deal with the Bay of Pigs debacle, came of age during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here too is a clarifying picture of what was going on in Khrushchev's Soviet Union. Martin Sherwin has spent his career in the study of nuclear weapons and how they have shaped our world. Gambling with Armegeddon is an outstanding capstone to his work thus far.

Published annually since 1992, the 2005 edition of this bestselling guide continues to gain fame as the best available source for information on U.S. casinos. The new 2005 edition lists more than 650 casinos in 35 states and comes complete with maps of all states showing where the casinos are located, plus detailed maps of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Reno and the Mississippi gambling resort towns of Biloxi and Tunica.