As a genre, the problem with Ivy League crime books is one of audience. The only people who would be scandalized at the thought of a New York City bookie operation manned and run by young grads of Brown and Harvard University (especially after the publicity surrounding a prostitution ring at the former and, more recently, a stripper's memoir by an alum of the latter), would be parents who footed the bill to send their children there -- and they're not likely to gravitate toward such unreassuring reading material. As for Ivy Leaguers themselves, beyond the shallow joys of panning for gossip, they may find that this autobiographical account of the betting life relies too heavily on the pseudo-incendiary mixing of high expectations with low doings -- a weak cocktail for anyone who has witnessed a trust-fund drug dealer in action at a campus party. Still, author Peter Alson manages to make his little-boy-lost-in-a-big-bad-world tale appealing, if only because his emerging sense of triumph -- over tricky gambling concepts, over feeling forever unemployable -- seems genuine and unaffected. Even cute, accented as it is by "shaddup's" and "broken-nosed gangstery faces," for Alson's writing is most atmospheric when laced with misgivings about his macho surroundings. About the people who rent out their scummy East Village apartments to bookies, he asks, "How could they sacrifice the sanctity of their domicile to a bunch of noisy louts?" About his boss (called "Boss"), he observes the man's "tanned Dewar's-and-water belly. It was a classic gut, not flabby the way fat is, but rock-hard and shiny, like he had swallowed something very large whole." Swiftly paced, lean (but not mean), and at times funny, Alson's memoir ably bluffs its way through a weak hand: a plot that -- even with a passage depicting a smelly night in the slammer -- needs the harangues of an unstable girlfriend to give it some dramatic heft. Ultimately, it's Alson's take at the end of his adventure (a paltry $8,000, net, for his trouble) that sums up the stakes here: Small-time.

--Jeanie Pyun