This book is based on field research into the world of gambling in the Cretan town of Chania. The research focused on gamblers at work, as it were. Thomas Malaby has obviously observed plenty of gambling activity, and he draws on these data to document his performative approach to gambling. Near the beginning of the book (p. 22), he states that he will not focus on life histories or on the gamblers’ expansive reflections about their practices, but this delimitation is perhaps too modest. At several points during the book the gamblers deliver wonderful observations on life and risk taking. Certainly, the final chapter makes good use of Nikos’s statements, such as his gnomic reflection before dying young from liver failure, that “the biggest risk in life is friendship” (p. 74). The interest and quality of these collected data are matched by the power of the narrative, for example, the delightful description of the technique for slapping down backgammon pieces onto the playing board (p. 65)—a sight and sound familiar to anyone who has spent time in Greece. The overall result is a highly readable book that will be accessible to students at all levels while offering much to advanced researchers.

Malaby’s main theoretical goal is to offer a new way of conceptualizing risk. Researchers have constructed, he says, typologies of society (e.g., traditional vs. modern) based on how people understand and respond to risk. Anthony Giddens, for example, has contended that modernity involves the ongoing assessment of risk and its rational confrontation; risk-taking behaviors represent failures of rationality. Malaby makes the useful observation that risk has been intellectualized and macrotheorized, but few have taken the trouble to do the ethnography of risk. Granted that all people confront risks in our daily lives, but how do we act or perform in the face of it? This study offers particular ethnographic insight into the ways in which gamblers in Chania, primarily men, confront the risks of gambling. The frame of reference inevitably extends beyond actual gaming to consider gambling as a metaphor for confronting other life situations such as business, illness, and relationships. The gamblers themselves constantly make these associations.

Malaby’s main finding is that, in the face of the greatest uncertainty, Cretan men perform surety, composure, arrogance, and bravado. When things are most dangerous and ruinously out of control, one must not evince fear or despair but project the impression of unfazed, knowing mastery, which Malaby perceptively labels “instrumental nonchalance” (p. 87). The concepts gamblers appeal to in explaining success or failure (e.g., fate, odds, purity), he terms “tropes of accountability” (p. 20). These tropes inform the ways in which people square up to risk and to life, in general. To perform fear or self-pity is to have already lost, as in the case of the gambling café owner who grouses about how few customers he has, thereby causing even those few to desert his shop. The situation contrasts with the response of Max Weber’s early Calvinists who, when faced with the uncertainty of theodicy, elected to perform upstanding frugality.

This is a highly circumscribed book that focuses a narrow beam on gambling activity and does not ethnographically investigate the positions and situations of the men in their family lives or daily employment or in relation to society outside the gambling den. I would like to know many more details, ranging from how gambling sits with one’s domestic partner to whether there is, indeed, continuity in performance from gambling to daily life situations. Is gambling just a game or part of one’s whole lifestyle? Orthodox Christianity is not factored in. Does belief in God, or in the efficacy of prayer, cut across gambling ideology or performance at any level? Any good book stimulates questions for further reflection and research. There can be no doubt that Gambling Life stands on its own as a successful and coherent analysis of gambling in Greek life.