Download or read book My Week at the Blue Angel written by Matthew O'Brien and published by Huntington Press Inc. This book was released on 2011-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A savage journey into the heart of Hunter S. Thompson's Las Vegas with the Good Doctor as tour guide. A Lord-of-the-Rings-like adventure in the city's underground flood channels. A seven-day stay at a seedy motel on East Fremont Street. The stories in My Week at the Blue Angel aren't about Steve Wynn, Cirque du Soleil, or how to play poker, and they aren't set in Caesars Palace, XS Nightclub, or a 2,000-seat showroom. They're about prostitutes, ex-cons, and the homeless, and they're set under Caesars Palace and in trailer parks and weekly motels. In this creative nonfiction collection, Matthew O'Brien--author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas--and veteran photographer Bill Hughes show a side of the city rarely seen. A side beyond the neon lights, themed facades, and motel-room doors. A side beyond the barbwire fences, No Trespassing signs, and midnight shadows.
Download or read book My Vegas Groom written by Piper Rayne and published by Piper Rayne, Inc.. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Waking up next to a stranger wearing a wedding ring was not on the itinerary. I came to Las Vegas for a quick girl’s trip, but somehow ended up a married woman. What I thought would stay in Vegas followed me back to my small town of Sunrise Bay, Alaska. Of course, my new husband—MMA champion fighter, Logan Stone—couldn’t find me alone at my house to tell me he wants to give our impromptu nuptials a shot. He has to tell me in front of my entire family and half the town. The two of us couldn’t be more opposite, but he offers me a deal I can’t refuse which involves me pretending we’re happily married for three months. Yeah, a lot of things can change in that short amount of time, most importantly catching feelings for a man whose lifestyle I despise.
Download or read book My Las Vegas Airman written by Brittany Fichter and published by Brittany Fichter. This book was released on 2020-12-12 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can he afford to gamble with his heart? Chris: Staff Sergeant Christopher Daniel Brooking plays life safe. Order, determination, and hard work have served him well in the Air Force, and he’s about to take the next step toward his life-long dream: becoming an officer. Unfortunately, the experimental officer training program that he’s been accepted to is in Las Vegas, the very epitome of the kind of life Chris detests the most. And even worse, the college student he’s been assigned as his “university guide” might be charming and adorable, but she’s also one of the most scatterbrained people he’s ever had the misfortune of working with. It will be a miracle if he can keep his carefully crafted routine intact while surviving the semester with her by his side. The more he gets to know the misadventurous, bubbly Skylar, however, the more he begins to realize that there might be more than his strict adherence to rules on the line. He might be in danger of losing his heart as well. *** Skylar: Las Vegas native, Skylar, doesn’t mean to get into scrapes. Nor does she mean to leave her homework on the printer at home or lock her keys in her car or blurt out whatever she’s thinking. But it happens, and because of her unfortunate...tendencies, she’s about to flunk out of one of her foundational hospitality courses. So when the chance to earn extra credit by helping a new Air Force student around the city for a semester is offered, Skylar jumps at it with gusto. She quickly realizes, however, that Chris Brooking is one of the handsomest, biggest squares Skylar has met. Never one to be intimidated by first impressions, though, she soldiers on and does her best to crack his shell to find the amazing person she’s sure is hiding beneath. In her attempt to unlock his secrets, however, Skylar ends up discovering truths of her own that she’d rather not face. So when the broody airman offers to help, she must decide whether she can bear to let him see the pain and insecurities she tries so hard to hide...or push him out forever. My Las Vegas Airman is the third book in the My Air Force Fairy Tale series, clean and wholesome standalone novels about life and love with military men. Read it today to find love, truth, and the magic of happily ever after.
Download or read book The Frugal Gambler written by Jean Scott and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gambling personality Jean Scott shares her secrets to taking advantage of specials provided by casinos and low-rolling advantage-play techniques, discussing slot machines, video poker, comps, promotions, the ethics of gambling, and other related topics.
Download or read book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Harper Perennial Modern Classics written by Hunter S. Thompson and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive ...”’
Download or read book Las Vegas Then and Now written by Su Kim Chung and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2022-11-24 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Las Vegas Then and Now pairs vintage shots from 100 years of the city's history with the same view today.
Download or read book Las Vegas 1905 1965 written by Lynn M. Zook and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone thinks they know the story of Las Vegas: the showgirls, the gambling, the mob. But Las Vegas has always been much more. Families have lived here since its founding in 1905. After 1931, legalized gaming became the big tourist draw, and following World War II, the town began to market itself as "America's Playground." That is when the famed Las Vegas Strip came into its own and downtown was dubbed "Glitter Gulch." These vintage postcards show how Las Vegas evolved from a dusty railroad town into the "Entertainment Capital of the World," while remaining a city filled with families and pioneering souls.
Download or read book Leaving Las Vegas written by John O'Brien and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “brutal and unflinching” novel of fleeting love in Sin City inspired the film starring Nicholas Cage and Elizabeth Shue (Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City). John O’Brien’s debut novel, Leaving Las Vegas, is an emotionally wrenching story of a woman who embraces life and a man who rejects it; a powerful tale of hard luck, hard drinking, and a relationship of tenderness and destruction. An avowed alcoholic, Ben drinks away his family, friends, and, finally, his job. With deliberate resolve, he burns the remnants of his life and heads for Las Vegas to end it all in the last great binge of his hopeless life. On the Strip, he picks up Sera, a prostitute, in what might have become another excess in his self-destructive jag. Instead, their chance meeting becomes a respite on the road to oblivion as they form a bond that is as mysterious as it is immutable.
Download or read book Addiction by Design written by Natasha Dow Schüll and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-11 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible--even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and cash access systems--all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. Addiction by Design is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life. At stake in Schüll's account of the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance is a blurring of the line between design and experience, profit and loss, control and compulsion.
Download or read book Beneath the Neon written by Matthew O'Brien and published by Huntington Press Inc. This book was released on 2010-12-20 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas chronicles O'Brien's adventures in subterranean Las Vegas. He follows the footsteps of a psycho killer. He braces against a raging flood. He parties with naked crackheads. He learns how to make meth, that art is most beautiful where it's least expected, that in many ways, he prefers underground Las Vegas to aboveground Las Vegas, and that there are no pots of gold under the neon rainbow
Download or read book Being Oscar written by Oscar Goodman and published by Weinstein Books. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Being Oscar,one of America’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys recounts the stories and cases of his epic life. The Mafia’s go-to defender, he has tried an estimated 300 criminal cases, and won most of them. His roster of clients reads like a history of organized crime: Meyer Lansky, Nicky Scarfo, and “Lefty” Rosenthal, as well as Mike Tyson and boxing promoter Don King, along with a midget, a dentist, and a federal judge. After thirty-five years as a defender, he ran for mayor of Las Vegas, and America’s greatest Mob lawyer became the mayor of its sexiest city. He was so popular his image appeared on the 5, 25, and 100 chips. While mayor of Vegas, he starred on the screen in Rush Hour 2 and CSI. He is as large a character in the history of organized crime as any of his clients and as legendary a figure in the history of Las Vegas as the entrepreneurs (his friends and clients) who built the city. This is his astonishing story—the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Download or read book The Broke and Beautiful Life written by Stefanie O'Connell and published by Coventry House Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After moving to New York City to become a Broadway actress, Stefanie O'Connell faced one of two inevitabilities when faced with unemployment--spiral into debt or learn how to effectively manage her money. Punctuated with humor, insight, and essential money management lessons, The Broke and Beautiful Life offers practical strategies to make smarter financial decisions today as a means to fulfill the goals and dreams of tomorrow. Specializing in personal finance (with an emphasis on personal), Stefanie engages those who shy away from the word "investing," scoff at the word "budget," and equate interest rates with "snooze fest." She encourages readers to redefine their relationship with money and approach budgeting as an exciting and sexy tool to transform from broke to beautiful while enjoying every step along the way.
Download or read book What Stays in Vegas written by Adam Tanner and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The greatest threat to privacy today is not the NSA, but good-old American companies. Internet giants, leading retailers, and other firms are voraciously gathering data with little oversight from anyone. In Las Vegas, no company knows the value of data better than Caesars Entertainment. Many thousands of enthusiastic clients pour through the ever-open doors of their casinos. The secret to the company's success lies in their one unrivaled asset: they know their clients intimately by tracking the activities of the overwhelming majority of gamblers. They know exactly what games they like to play, what foods they enjoy for breakfast, when they prefer to visit, who their favorite hostess might be, and exactly how to keep them coming back for more. Caesars' dogged data-gathering methods have been so successful that they have grown to become the world's largest casino operator, and have inspired companies of all kinds to ramp up their own data mining in the hopes of boosting their targeted marketing efforts. Some do this themselves. Some rely on data brokers. Others clearly enter a moral gray zone that should make American consumers deeply uncomfortable. We live in an age when our personal information is harvested and aggregated whether we like it or not. And it is growing ever more difficult for those businesses that choose not to engage in more intrusive data gathering to compete with those that do. Tanner's timely warning resounds: Yes, there are many benefits to the free flow of all this data, but there is a dark, unregulated, and destructive netherworld as well.
Download or read book Elvis in Vegas written by Richard Zoglin and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Outstanding pop-culture history.” —Newsday The “smart and zippy account” (The Wall Street Journal) of how Las Vegas saved Elvis and Elvis saved Las Vegas in the greatest musical comeback of all time. Elvis’s 1969 opening night in Vegas was his first time back on a live stage in more than eight years. His career had gone sour—bad movies, mediocre pop songs that no longer made the charts—and he’d been dismissed by most critics as over-the-hill. But in Vegas he played the biggest showroom in the biggest hotel in the city, drawing more people for his four-week engagement than any other show in Vegas history. His performance got rave reviews; “Suspicious Minds,” the song he introduced there, gave him his first number-one hit in seven years; and Elvis became Vegas’s biggest star. Over the next seven years, he performed more than 600 shows there, and sold out every one. Las Vegas was changed, too. By the end of the ‘60s, Vegas’ golden age—when the Rat Pack led a glittering array of stars who made it the nation’s premier live-entertainment center—was losing its luster. Elvis created a new kind of Vegas show: an over-the-top, rock-concert extravaganza. He set a new bar for Vegas performers, with the biggest salary, the biggest musical production, and the biggest promotion campaign the city had ever seen. He opened the door to a new generation of pop/rock artists and brought a new audience to Vegas—not the traditional well-heeled older gamblers, but a mass audience from Middle America that Vegas depends on for its success to this day. At once “a fascinating history of Vegas as gambling capital, celebrity playground, mob hangout, [and] entertainment Valhalla” (Rolling Stone) and the incredible “tale of how the King got his groove back” (Associated Press), Elvis in Vegas is a classic feel-good story for the ages.
Download or read book Las Vegas Is My Beat written by Ralph Pearl and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Then One Day written by Chris Andrews and published by . This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Then One Day... describes the colorful scene of legal sports books in the memoir of Chris Andrews, who built a Las Vegas career out of sports betting.
Download or read book The Strip written by Stefan Al and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformations of the Strip—from the fake Wild West to neon signs twenty stories high to “starchitecture”—and how they mirror America itself. The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015—ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the “implosion capital of the world” as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new—offering a non-metaphorical definition of “creative destruction.” In The Strip, Stefan Al examines the many transformations of the Las Vegas Strip, arguing that they mirror transformations in America itself. The Strip is not, as popularly supposed, a display of architectural freaks but representative of architectural trends and a record of social, cultural, and economic change. Al tells two parallel stories. He describes the feverish competition of Las Vegas developers to build the snazziest, most tourist-grabbing casinos and resorts—with a cast of characters including the mobster Bugsy Siegel, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and the would-be political kingmaker Sheldon Adelson. And he views the Strip in a larger social context, showing that it has not only reflected trends but also magnified them and sometimes even initiated them. Generously illustrated with stunning color images throughout, The Strip traces the many metamorphoses of a city that offers a vivid projection of the American dream.
