POSITIVELY FIFTH STREET

In the spring of 2000. Harper's Magazine sent James McManus to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker -- in particular, the mush-rooming progress of women in the $23 million event, and the murder of Ted Binion, the tournament's prodigal host, purportedly done in by a stripper and her boyfriend with a technique so outre it took a Manhattan pathologist to identify it. Whether a jury would convict the attractive young couple was another story altogether. But when McManus sets foot in town, the lure of the tables is too strong: he proceeds to risk his entire Harper's advance in a long-shot attempt to play in the tournament himself. Only with actual experience at the table (he tells his skeptical wife) can he capture the hair-raising subtleties of the kind of poker that determines the world champion. The heart of the book is his deliciously suspenseful account of the tournament itself -- the players, the hands, and his own unlikely progress in it. Written in the tradition of The Gambler and The Biggest Game in Town. Positively Fifth Street is a high-stakes adventure, and a terrifying but often hilarious account of one man's effort to understand what Edward O. Wilson has called "Pleistocene exigencies" -- the eros and logistics of our primary competitive instincts. Book jacket.