Six different countries. Twenty eight professional poker players. All of them Real Grinders. If you’ve ever wanted to know if you have what it takes to be a professional poker player, now is your chance to find out. We’ve brought together some of the best pro players from around the world to talk about what it's like playing poker for a living; the good parts, the bad parts, the successes, and the challenges. Everything that separates the winners from the losers in a game where fortunes can be won or lost on the turn of a card, and a level head and a quick wit control the table. Professional poker doesn't get more real than this.

It is becoming evident that satisfying the ever-increasing global demand for energy is having a major impact on the environment. The technologies required to minimize such impacts are discussed here in an in-depth overview and review of a broad spectrum of energy and environmental issues. The first five sections of the book deal directly with scientific and technological topics: the production, transportation, and utilization of electric power; thermal science and engineering for energy conservation/utilization processes; gas hydrates; multiphase mechanics for energy and environmental technology; pollutants and radioactive wastes in the earth. The sixth section, unique in a book of this type, focuses on education, recording a panel discussion on solutions to problems of energy and environment. For specialists and nonspecialists alike, the book is thus a valuable guide to the technological challenges for the future.

In the early '80s, recovering from my divorce, I moved from Ketchum, Idaho, to Palo Alto, California, to live temporarily with my sister Martin and her family, the other Martins, until I found an apartment. My brother-in-law was and still is a pastor in the Nazarene church. Also attending the church were two college mates of mine and the Martins, Jan and Doug Burgesen and their two children (the two kids, Stevie and Cindy, not Doug and Jan) who could not pronounce "Uncle Ken." It came out "Koko Ken." Soon, very soon, I was known to the whole church (even to my niece Jennifer and my two nephews, Todd and Gabe) as Koko Ken, which gave me the title of this book. Because of a birth defect, spina bifida (the definition's in the book), I wasn't expected to live past six weeks. As of this writing, October 1, 2012, I'm six weeks shy of sixty-two years old. I've lived a very fortunate life. I've hiked up two volcanoes, Lassen and Diamond Head. I've ten speeded down Mt. Haleakala. I played Chopin's, King Faruk's, and Carnegie Hall's pianos. Read my book. It's funny. It's sad. It's me. I'm almost a George Plimpton.