Isildur1 had a reputation that precedes them. They would play any player and create a buzz, unlike any poker player before them. For international customers: The center is staffed and provides answers on Sundays through Thursdays between 7AM and 14PM Israel time Toll

First, Cairo Martyr, the Nubian dragoman with pale blue eyes who has made a fortune selling mummy dust cut with quinine as an aphrodisiac. Then Joe O’Sullivan Beare, an Irish patriot who now smuggles arms for the Haganah inside giant hollow scarabs, and trades in sacred phallic amulets. And then Munk Szondi, the scion of a powerful Budapest-based banking house run by a matriarchal directorate known as The Sarahs, who trades in futures—any and all futures. But I still give the book four stars. Thank goodness Whittemore much different writer than Pynchon. Even though he's dealing with complex, mysterious, secret worlds, he doesn't feel the need to clog his prose with the same obscurantism. Whittemore is hugely ambitious, he swoops and he weaves everywhere, almost Proust-like in his scope. He wants to cram everything into his book. He has a kind of earnestness which may not be in style today (thus my own distaste for his romance sections) but the book really is enormously rewarding.

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Glistening sweat and decaying fat. Sunrise. Cairo Martyr puffed lazily and turned his gaze north when he heard the distant drone of an airplane. A fascinating mélange of fact and fiction focusing on the Middle East in general and Jerusalem in particular. As jumbled as a Finnegans Wake. It never sold well perhaps because it’s not that good. But it has the bones of greatness. Imaginative. Twelve years of ferocious poker for the highest of stakes after an initial hand was dealt by chance one cold December day in 1921—seemingly by chance, to pass the time that gray afternoon in Jerusalem when the sky was heavily overcast and wind whipped through the alleys, snow definitely in the air. This is a book organized around friendships, and that is one of its real strengths on a character level. I really felt Joe's connection with Ahmad, Liffy (oh Liffy!), Bletchley and the Sisters. Again, not as much with Stern, because when Joe gets to Stern he sort of starts ranting at him, and so the dude we're expecting answers from spends a lot of time sitting and listening to Joe speechifying so there is not as much a connection show. The romance in the book is kept small which is good, because I found the scenes with Joe and Maud (who is now connected to Stern) rather too sentimental, and didn't jibe with a harder view of other things in the world. Actually I expected Maud to betray Joe, but in the end this doesn't seem to have happened, though it might have also been too subtle to me. (Again, I am rambling. There is a LOT in this book.)

But before the final hand is played to determine the destiny of the Holy City, a dangerous new player enters the picture: Nubar Wallenstein, an Albanian alchemist determined to achieve immortality, and heir to the world’s largest oil syndicate. He finances a vast network of spies dedicated to destroying the players, and his aim is to win complete power over Jerusalem. In 1993 the WSOP Main Event poker match was the first tournament to have a prize pool of 1 million dollars. An author of extraordinary talents, albeit one who eludes comparison with other writers… . The milieu is one which readers of espionage novels may think themselves familiar, and yet it’s totally transformed—by the writer’s wild humour, his mystical bent, and his bicameral perception of history and time. — Harper’s on Jerusalem Poker Whittemore, however, enjoys writing these stories that meander all over the place. In Jerusalem Poker, he turns to Joe’s life after Smyrna, when he, Cairo Martyr, and Munk Szondi play their epic poker game. They come together by chance, but as usual with the books, they’re connected in ways they couldn’t imagine. Cairo learned how to be a dragoman in Egypt under the tutelage of Menelik Ziwar, who was Strongbow’s best friend. Munk was descended from a Swiss explorer who settled in Hungary and married, but not before he had already gotten an obscure Albanian noblewoman pregnant, said child growing up to be Skanderbeg Wallenstein, forger of the Sinai Bible. The Swiss explorer later traveled through the Sudan and impregnated yet another woman, whose grandson was Cairo Martyr, making he and Munk distant cousins. Munk is friends with Maud, although he met her after she left Joe in Jerusalem. He also has a brief affair with the elderly grandmother of Nubar Wallenstein, who is the odd villain in the book, one who becomes obsessed with the poker game but remains largely ineffectual at destroying it. The three men spend their years becoming richer and richer but also destroying players they deem unworthy – men who buy and sell slaves, men who steal religious icons – until the game ends in 1933. It’s not quite as emotionally affecting as the first book, but Whittemore builds on the relationships established in Sinai Tapestry to add depth to the characters.

At first I thought it was just druggie humour (and it IS damn funny) and then I figured maybe historical speculation with a satirical edge, until it started playing with my mundane perceptions of time, history, and causality. It's the kind of book (series) that weaves itself into your dreams. I’ve been thinking about doing a series about various pop culture stuff that are, in my mind, under- or even totally unappreciated. These can be works that are critically acclaimed but deserve to be more popular, popular but deserve to be more critically acclaimed, or neither popular nor critically acclaimed and deserve something from the masses. Greg Hatcher has always written about some obscure corners of pop culture, but he’s kind of carved out a niche in the pulp fiction and science fiction genres, and if I come across something from those, I’ll write about them, but I’m going to be a bit more catholic in my purview. I’m going to write about books, music, television, and movies, and maybe some other stuff, too, if I think of it. I already have several topics in mind, and I’m starting with some of my favorite books – the four novels that make up Edward Whittemore’s “Jerusalem Quarter”– Sinai Tapestry (1977), Jerusalem Poker (1979), Nile Shadows (1983), and Jericho Mosaic (1987). It was during these early fall visits that I discovered that his Prentiss great-grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister who had made his way up the Hudson River by boat from New York to Troy and then over to Vermont by train and wagon in the 1860s. In the library of the white, rambling Victorian house in Dorset there were shelves of fading leather-bound volumes of popular romances written by his great-grandmother for shop girls, informing them how to improve themselves, dress, and find suitable husbands. I gathered she was the Danielle Steele of her day, and the family’s modest wealth was due to her literary efforts and not the generosity of the church’s congregation.