This astonishing book reveals that there's a lot more to playing slot machines-one of America's fastest growing forms of entertainment-than good fun, deep relaxation and the dream of a multi-million-dollar jackpot. Slots tells how the machines work, how the random numbers that govern them are generated, and how the casinos make their profit . . . slowly but surely . . . as they keep only a dime of every dollar invested. It also offers strategies of slot play, and suggests alternate activities to distract us when casinos become harmfully habitual.

But ultimately, as Dr. Forrest writes, to spend one's time feeding money to the machines is to participate in, well . . . a form of prayer. And the gaming industry seems very much aware of it, as players annually plunge more than $365-billion into slots (of which casinos keep about $30-billion); and as casinos-70 to 85 percent of whose profits are earned by slot machines-have spread to more than a dozen states and even into a number of racetracks (where they're called "racinos").

What this book describes with both humor and a sense of awe is the way slots emporia have steadily been transformed from underground grottos to soaring cathedral-like structures where congregants sit and commune-all to the end of worshipping the god of chance.


A native New Yorker, David V. Forrest, M.D., studied criticism at Princeton University and received his medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic training at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he is now clinical professor of psychiatry. He was chief of the largest U.S. Army psychiatric clinic in Vietnam at the peak of American involvement there and received the Bronze Star. He is a past president of the American College of Psychoanalysts and the New York Clinical Society, and is a fellow of the Explorers Club.

In addition to writing hundreds of scholarly articles on psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, applied psychoanalysis, literary analysis, anthropology, and artificial mind, he has coauthored an educational videotape series, was a consultant to the television show Star Trek, and has created a slang dictionary for foreign doctors. He lives in New York City with his wife, Lynne Stetson. They have two grown children.