Scribe is delighted to announce that we have acquired a nonfiction book by debut author Drew Rooke, provisionally titled The Final Spin: the power and peril of Australia’s relationship with poker machines.
Drew is a writer and journalist based in Sydney. His work deals with contemporary political and cultural issues, and has appeared in publications such as The Saturday Paper, Meanjin, and The Sydney Morning Herald.
The Final Spin is an expansion of Drew’s essay ‘Machine Highs’, which was highly commended in the 2015 Scribe Nonfiction Prize.
More than 200,000 poker machines sing and flash in pubs, clubs, and casinos in every corner of the country. They’re highly complex devices, their components designed by mathematicians, musicians, animators, and ergonomic experts. They’re also widely considered the most harmful form of gambling, the cause of the majority of gambling addictions. So how did Australia evolve into a pokie nation?
With startlingly candid interviews from problem gamblers, politicians, manufacturers, neuroscientists, counsellors, anti-gambling campaigners, and gambling advocates, The Final Spin explores how the machines work to hook people in, and the vicious fight being waged to evict them from the country’s social life. It is a confronting tale about the human cost of addiction, of governments pandering to corporate interests, and of the insidious power of the industry’s PR spin.
The Final Spin will be published in 2018.