Swings and Arrows

Good

I love the trademark humor of Mr Mollo. But I have reservation in the wisdom of the editor to use new deals for the original text. I just started reading the book and spotted an error on pp. 17-18. After the Hog cleared the trumps, he crossed to the ace of diamonds in dummy. The text says that he went back to the closed hand by overtaking the queen of spades. But at the point the dummy is already out of spades!I hope I won’t find similar mistakes in the rest of the book. It would really be a huge annoyance in reading an otherwise great book.

EVEN THOUGH I DON'T KNOW HOW TO PLAY BRIDGE VERY WELL AT ALL. MY PARENTS MY MOM REALLY PLAYED THE GAME ALOT BUT SHE SAID SHE WASN'T GOOD AT PLAYING BRIDGE I REALLY THINK SHE WAS BETTER AT IT THEM SHE THOUGHT SHE WAS. AND ANYBODY WHO KNOWS HOW TO PLAY THIS GAME WOULD LOVE THE LATE VICTOR MOLLOS ADOREABLE ANIMALS PLAYING BRIDGE BOOKS. I JUST LOVE THIS BOOK I HAVE THE FIRST ONE ORDER THIS IS THE THIRD IN THE BOOKS I PLAN TO BUY THE REST OF THEM. EVEN IF YOU DON'T PLAY BRIDGE AT ALL YOU WOULD STILL LOVE THE BOOKS ABOUT ALL THE FUNNY ANIMALS.PLAYING BRIDGE. I LOVED THIS BOOK IT IS EASY TO READ AND REALLY EASY TO UNDERSTAND I CAN EVEN UNDERSTAND THE BRIDGE HANDS AND HOW THEY GO WHICH A GOOD THING. YOU SHOULD READ THESE BOOKS YOU WILL BE GLAD YOU DID.

While the characters and the action are familiar to Mollo readers, most of the hands are new. It is a decent conclusion to the Menagerie series.

Whether 30 yrs ago or reading Mollo today, pure enjoyment.

Even the dregs of Victor Mollo's unpublished articles are worth buying. Buy this if you loved the Bride in th Menagerie series.

I loved it! This had all the squabbling characters I have come to love, amazing bridge hands, great humor, and the expertise that makes me wish I was the Hideous Hog.

Perfect stories, humor and extremely well written. Need to be a bridge player to appreciate this series, but any bridge player would. Somewhat advanced plays.

Mark Horton has edited together Mollo's remaining articles which have not been published in book form, into a series of 4 four final books. After the shortcomings of the first of them, The Hog Takes to Precision, where many hands had in fact been previously published, Ron Tacchi set up a computer catalogue of the articles to try to assess which were genuninely unpublished, as his Introduction to "Diamonds are the Hog's Best Friend" sets out. Tacchi had a difficult job due to Mollo's habit of reusing material. It wasn't just that he turned it out again, often he re-edited it: reused a hand with different text; switched around the suits; re-used text with different hands; reused part of an article with new material elsewhere.Tacchi created a catalogue of all the hands and tried to use computer indexing to spot the repetitions. He wasn't always successful. There are many more republished hands in "Diamonds..." than Tacchi thought at the time. But he got better at it for these last two volumes. I only spotted only a couple of (unacknowledged) repetitions in this volume. And I read this volume straight after reading all 9 preceding books in sequence before it.As another reviewer spots, there is the odd hand where the logic has gone wrong. Horton did spot some of these and footnote them, but there's a couple he didn't spot, like on p17-18, and occasional misprints.But overall, this is a really worthwhile new collection. The few small mistakes we can forgive in over 200 pages of new material. We also spend extended time with some characters who did not or rarely made it into the early volumes: Gavin the Goose, Percy the Prattling Parrot, etc. We can understand why - they are weaker characters than our old favourites, but they provide useful variety: Gavin is a massive overbidder; Percy gets bored and misbehaves disruptively.Overall, I enjoyed this book the most of the final four posthumous works.

Arrived swiftly and in good condition. Book good even though not by original author, the humour is retained to some extent.

great fun

Full of useful information. A good read,

Excellent but not for the beginner