Reviews
“For A Dollar and a Dream is a powerful and incisive look into the lottery era in this country and how gambling is a reflection of its time. Jonathan D. Cohen reveals how state governments have gambled with the citizenry as they ‘bet on betting’ to avoid taxation. Most importantly he de-stigmatizes those people who play lotteries, showing that a quest to hit it big with winning tickets is a quest to achieve the American Dream by any means necessary. Luck is at the heart of lotteries, and we're lucky that Cohen decided to write this deeply researched and captivating book.”
—Bridgett M. Davis, author of The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers
“How [the lottery] came to be is the subject of an excellent new book, For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America, by the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the heart of Cohen’s book is a peculiar contradiction: on the one hand, the lottery is vastly less profitable than its proponents make it out to be, a deception that has come at the expense of public coffers and public services. On the other hand, it is so popular that it is both extremely lucrative for the private companies that make and sell tickets and financially crippling for its most dedicated players…Lottery tickets can seem like either a benign form of entertainment or a dangerous addiction. The question that lurks within For a Dollar and a Dream is which category they really belong to—and, accordingly, whether governments charged with promoting the general welfare should be in the business of producing them, publicizing them, and profiting from them.”
—Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker
“Into this wild decade of NFTs, SPACs, and cryptocurrencies, wherein America’s meritocratic ethos is confronted by a casino’s worth of speculative investment schemes, Jonathan Cohen delivers more than just a fascinating history of state lotteries, but a window into the nation’s hot mess of humanity: our tribal tendencies, social hierarchies, economic insecurities, political chicanery, religious delusions, aversion to taxation, and deeply held beliefs about work, fate, self-reliance, and deservedness of our fortunes, good or ill. For a Dollar and a Dream pegs America’s lottery fervor—we spent more than $91 billion on tickets in 2020—to the same societal forces that fueled the rise of prosperity gospel during the ’60s and ’70s. Games of chance and faith in the unknowable, as one source explains, are but two sides of the same coin, ways for humanity to deal with “life’s precarious prospects.”
—Michael Mechanic, author of Jackpot: How the Super-Wealthy Really Live, and How Their Wealth Harms Us All
“With a fluid narrative that travels from the sidewalks of Newark and Chicago, to sunny California, to Bible Belt Georgia, this book allows us to understand the manner in which a complex and pernicious system of government lotteries has emerged. Cohen examines our sordid politics as well as our inner lives, shedding light on the dreamworld that lotteries have created in which American beliefs about wealth and religion have blurred into a confused synthesis. Widespread lottery participation has been at the center of American reaction to the emergence of glaring inequality in the late twentieth century. State governments have adopted an adverse position towards their citizens, and this book explains how this all came to be.”
—Matthew Vaz, author of Running the Numbers: Race, Police, and the History of Urban Gambling
“In this valuable new book, Cohen carries on the commission’s work, methodically and persuasively demonstrating how, despite their widespread popularity, state lotteries consistently prey on the underprivileged, corrupt state officials, and generate far less revenue than promised.”