Dice: Deception, Fate, & Rotten Luck

A classic small celebration and meditation on dice through the ages; both brilliant and beautiful. Jay's writing is exactly what one would expect from the extremely erudite, witty and decent author of Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women and Jay's Journal of Anomalies, There is an explanation of the etymology of craps, and there are various tales of armless dicers, ingenious hustlers, and Scandinavian kings of the Middle Ages who diced for islands. Dice turn out to be rich subjects for Purcell's photography. She presents them as, in a way, monumental ruins on a Stonehenge-type of scale relative to the book. Their forms are enriched by their disintegration and are bathed in light that their varying translucence seems to contain for a moment before releasing it to the lens . . . The book itself is, like a die, a modest object, small for a book of photography and, with a short text, casually organized.--Crispin Sartwell, Los Angeles Times 21 color photographs.