Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker    You may not play poker yourself but for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the fate of the free world has been determined by men who do. So this recommendation is not for those who already play the game - if you do, you needn't bother reading the rest of this review, just go off and buy the book - as to the non-player, this is seriously worth their attention.    Although it began as poque, a French game that developed in New Orleans and headed up the Mississippi steamboats, by the mid-19th century poker was the most popular American amusement; the national game, in effect. So the history of America can be viewed through the history of poker, as James McManus quietly demonstrates. In this book you watch America grow up over a card table, from the wild west games which could either leave you broke, or dead, or both to the more polite early 20th-century scenes of respectable games.          And it is possible to argue, after reading this book, that history would be different if there were no such game which combined luck, intelligence, dishonesty, courage, skill and character. (There's a very good chapter which tries to work out how much luck is involved in the game.) Few over here have read or will read Shelby Foote's 2,836-page history of the American civil war, so we can be grateful that McManus provides us with a clear and elegant outline which tells how it was "the first work of history to explore how the game's wisdom and logic fit into the whole scheme of  _ ". Not only, for instance, was Ulysses S Grant a good poker player, but as a student at West Point   he'd learned the betting   strategies of many of his contemporaries who would go on to become rebel  generals. Nixon's poker game has already been analysed by Garry Wills in his Nixon Agonistes; Oskar Morgenstern, one of Eisenhower's advisers, pointed out that chess was Russians' national game and poker was the Americans'.          This is not, though, the history of poker, but, as the subtitle tells us, the story of poker, you will find fuller details elsewhere. This is a very flowing and impressionistic account, with a huge knowledge of the game; at times, in its mixing together of anecdote   and observation, it produces the feeling you might get from studying a work of art. McManus is a first-rate writer: controlled, sensitive, accurate and convincing. And if the game makes no sense to you or holds no appeal, it might be the case that you are putting yourself at a disadvantage when it comes to dealing with the rest of humankind. The purpose of the writing is   _  .
to persuade people to play poker to present American history to teach you some poker skills to recommend a book