Download or read book Out from Las Vegas written by Florine Lawlor and published by Spotted Dog Press (CA). This book was released on 1998-09 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lost in Las Vegas written by Dan Greenburg and published by Random House Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After crashing their spaceship in the Nevada desert, Klatu, Lek, and their sister Ploo go to Las Vegas in search of the one mechanic who can fix it.

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 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas written by Hunter S. Thompson and published by . This book was released on 2003-04-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a reissue of the novel inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's ether-fuelled, savage journey to the heart of the American Dream: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold... And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.

Download or read book Cult Vegas written by Mike Weatherford and published by Huntington Press Inc. This book was released on 2001 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mike Weatherford resurrects the mystique of Vegas's Golden Age--the '60s of history and legend--bringing the hipster legacy to new Vegasphiles. Meet '50s and '60s lounge greats the Treniers, the Mary Kaye Trio, and Louis Prima and Keely Smith; comedy legends Joe E. Lewis, Shecky Greene, and Don Rickles; and Vegas babes Vampira, Lili St. Cyr, Ann-Margret, and Tempest Storm. Weatherford also covers nearly every offbeat movie ever made about Las Vegas, as well as Elvis and Frank's impact on the town. This gorgeous entertainment retrospective is packed with showroom esoterica, descriptions of near-forgotten corners of Vegas cult musicology, odd trivia, and unsung heroes of a bygone era. Cult Vegas chronicles the major moments--the camp, the extreme, the awful--in short, the magic of Las Vegas' half-century run as an entertainment mecca.

Download or read book Las Vegas Noir written by Jarret Keene and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Launched by the summer '04 award-winning bestseller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. In this chilling portrait of America's Sin City, lady luck is just as likely to dispense cold hard cash as a cold-hearted killing. Brand-new stories by: John O'Brien, David Corbett, Scott Phillips, Nora Pierce, Bliss Esposito, Felicia Campbell, Jaq Greenspon, Jos Skinner, Pablo Medina, Christine McKellar, Lori Kozlowski, Vu Tran, Celeste Starr, Preston L. Allen, Tod Goldberg, and Janet Berliner. Las Vegas provides the classic sophistication and darkness necessary for a deadly noir story. Stylish, sultry, brimming with ambition and greed, the characters that populate this literary Las Vegas are pushed to the extremes of human experience. From the neon glitter of the Strip to the treacherous views of Red Rock Canyon and Boulder City, from the desperation of Naked City to the racial tensions of the Westside, no other location offers so many different avenues leading to serious trouble. Many legendary authors have turned their attention to Vegas to investigate the city's moods and mysteries. Now, the most recent crop of acclaimed writers explore the secret neighborhoods and byways of America's most sinful city, offering readers not only compelling noir tales but also an insider's understanding of this steamy oasis. These authors take readers beneath the surface flash of Freemont Street and the Strip and into the gritty multicultural environs of underground Vegas. Jarret Keene is author/editor of three books, including the poetry collection Monster Fashion, the alt-travel tome The Underground Guide to Las Vegas, and the unauthorized rock bio The Killers: Destiny Is Calling Me. He lives in Las Vegas. Todd James Pierce is the author of three books, including the novel A Woman of Stone and the short story collection Newsworld, which won the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. He is an assistant professor of English at Cal Poly University in San Luis Obispo, California.

Download or read book Super Casino written by Pete Earley and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2009-11-04 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively and probing book, award-winning author Pete Earley traces the extraordinary evolution of Las Vegas -- from the gaudy Mecca of the Rat Pack era to one of the country's top family vacation spots. He revisits the city's checkered history of moguls, mobsters, and entertainers, reveals the real stories of well-known power brokers like Steve Wynn and legends like Howard Hughes and Bugsy Siegel, and offers a fascinating portrait of the life, death, and fantastic rebirth of the Las Vegas Strip. Earley also documents the gripping tale of the entrepreneurs behind the rise and fall and rise again of one of the largest gaming corporations in the nation, Circus Circus -- to which he was given unique access. In his trademark you-are-there style, he takes us behind the scenes to meet the blackjack dealers and hookers, the heavy hitters and bit players, the security officers, cabbies, and showgirls who are caught up in the mercurial pace that pulses at the heart of this astounding city.

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 Lost Las Vegas written by Jeff Burbank and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lost Las Vegas traces the cherished places in the city that time and the brutal forces of economics have swept aside before the National Register of Historic Places could save them from the wrecker's ball or, in the case of Las Vegas, before the Neon Boneyard can claim them.Organised chronologically starting with the earliest losses and ending with the latest, the book details the many hotels and casinos that failed to move with the times and got swept away for something bigger, better and brighter.Legendary names in the field of entertainment have come and gone - the Sands hotel featured many of the rapack in residence, but the casino is long gone. Howard Hughes and the mob featured heavily in Vegas history but neither could sustain their success for very long. Today, it is the showgirl who is under threat. That Vegas institution is under threat from the big setpiece shows such as Cirque du Soleil.Losses include: Arizona Club, El Portal Theater, Clark County Courthouse, Hotel Nevada, First State Bank, Las Vegas Rail depot, El Dorado Club, Old Ice House, Atomic Tourism, Helldorado on Fremont Street, The Green Shack, El Rancho Vegas, Hotel Last Frontier, Desert Inn, Sands, Sahara, The Thunderbird, The Mint, Royal Nevada, Stardust, Showboat, Hotel Biltmore, Dunes, Hacienda, Moulin Rouge, Tally Ho, Paddlewheel/Debby Reynold’s. Silver Slipper, Tam O’Shanter, Bonanza, Boardwalk Casino, Old Las Vegas Convention Center, Landmark Hotel, Aladdin, La Concha, Westward Ho!, Castaways

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 Sun Sin Suburbia written by Geoff Schumacher and published by Stephens Press, LLC. This book was released on 2004 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People all over the globe know Las Vegas as gambling's Mecca, Sin City, the Entertainment Capital of the World, a resort destination that attracts more than 35 million visitors per year. But that's just one piece of the story of this fascinating metropolis of 1.5 million people - and counting. With more than 6,000 people rushing to the valley each month, Las Vegas responded to the influx with enthusiasm and a can-do attitude, all while coping with enormous economic, social and political challenges. This carefully documented history focuses on the most exciting and chaotic decade in Las Vegas history: the 1990s. Veteran journalist Geoff Schumacher captures the true essence of Las Vegas, seeing past the neon and discovering the multi-faceted communities beyond.

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.

Download or read book At the Sands The Casino That Shaped Classic Las Vegas Brought the Rat Pack Together and Went Out With a Bang written by David G. Schwartz and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-26 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lights are coming down. Frank, Dean, and Sammy are about to take the stage. This is the moment we remember, when Las Vegas became classic. And it was at the Sands. Built in 1952 over the ashes of Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson's last chance in Las Vegas, the Sands was a collective effort. Underworld figures like Meyer Lansky, Doc Stacher, and Frank Costello provided the cash. Beloved Texas gambler Jake Freedman was the public face. Manhattan nightclub king Jack Entratter kept the Copa Room filled and made the party happen, every night. Carl Cohen, esteemed as the greatest casino manager in the history of the business, made the team complete.No matter how well your casino is run, you need a good hook to get the gamblers through the door. Casino owners were learning that entertainment was a pretty fair hook. Entratter, who broke into the entertainment business as a bouncer at the Stork Club, had risen to become manager of the Copacabana, one of Manhattan's hottest hot spots, before heading to Las Vegas. At the Sands, "Mr. Entertainment" brought many of the brightest stars of the day to the casino's showroom, named the Copa Room. The Copa was the hottest ticket in America and, for performers, one of the most coveted stages in the nation. Headlining at the Sands-or even opening there-meant that you had made it.For gamblers, the Sands was paradise. For tourists, it was a chance to see some sophistication-and maybe run into a famous singer or actor. The resort itself became a celebrity. Early on, the Sands hosted numerous radio and television broadcasts, bringing the casino into American households coast to coast when gambling was still not entirely reputable. Las Vegas is a city built on public relations, and the Sands' Al Freeman was one of its early masters.The Sands did more than showcase stars: it made them shine brighter. In 1960, while filming Ocean's 11, the Rat Pack (though they were never called that in those days) came together onstage at the Sands, creating a cultural icon that would define the era. Behind the scenes, Davis and Sinatra resisted the prevailing segregationist mindset of Las Vegas and helped to overturn Jim Crow on the Strip. With Sinatra as its star, the Sands reached its highest point, hosting everyone from John F. Kennedy to Texas oilmen to Miami bookmakers.Yet the Sands wasn't all comps and curtain calls. Behind the scenes, the casino's connection with reputed mobsters made it a target. For years, the FBI tried to penetrate the casino, including a disastrous wiretapping operation that turned into a public embarrassment for the Bureau. And Frank Sinatra-at one point a 10 percent owner of the Sands-would divest his interests after a highly-publicized feud with Nevada gaming regulators over his friendship with alleged Chicago mob kingpin Sam Giancana.thanksAfter Howard Hughes bought the Sands in 1967 (with Frank Sinatra explosively departing soon after) the Sands lost some of its allure, but the casino soldiered on under Hughes and other owners before being sold to Sheldon Adelson, who closed the property in 1996 to make way for the Venetian mega-resort, along the way doing for conventions what Jack Entratter had done for entertainment in Las Vegas four decades earlier.In the end, the Sands went out with a bang-an implosion that brought down its hotel tower. It had a wild 44 year run. Along the way, a host of characters, including the Rat Pack (and their many friends) in all their glory, author Mario Puzo, Apollo astronauts, wealthy arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and President Ronald Reagan passed through the Sands' doors.At the Sands tells the story of how one of the most fondly remembered classic Las Vegas casinos beat the odds to become a success, staged some of the Strip's most memorable spectaculars, and paved the way for the next generation of Las Vegas resorts. The Sands may be gone, but it did not fade away.

Download or read book The Secret History of Las Vegas written by Chris Abani and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gritty, riveting, and wholly original murder mystery from PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author and 2015 Edgar Awards winner Chris Abani Before he can retire, Las Vegas detective Salazar is determined to solve a recent spate of murders. When he encounters a pair of conjoined twins with a container of blood near their car, he’s sure he has apprehended the killers, and enlists the help of Dr. Sunil Singh, a South African transplant who specializes in the study of psychopaths. As Sunil tries to crack the twins, the implications of his research grow darker. Haunted by his betrayal of loved ones back home during apartheid, he seeks solace in the love of Asia, a prostitute with hopes of escaping that life. But Sunil’s own troubled past is fast on his heels in the form of a would-be assassin. Suspenseful through the last page, The Secret History of Las Vegas is Chris Abani’s most accomplished work to date, with his trademark visionary prose and a striking compassion for the inner lives of outsiders.

Download or read book No Limit written by John L. Smith and published by Anthony Curtis. This book was released on 1997 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the modern Las Vegas casino operators, none had more flair than Bob Stupak. The self-proclaimed "Polish Maverick" rose from humble origins as the son of a Pittsburgh boss gambler to head one of the largest privately owned casinos in Las Vegas, the infamous Vegas World. Stupak parlayed a small slot joint into a $100 million-a-year gambling operation by manipulating the local and national media with outrageous stunts and promotions. His headline-grabbing handiwork is now the stuff of Las Vegas legend. Remember Vegas World's VIP Vacation? Stupak's cleverly worded advertisements flooded millions of mailboxes around the country and appeared in dozens of prominent national periodicals, including Playboy, Parade, and USA Today, attracting hordes of tourists to his out-of-the-way casino. Though the VIP Vacation became the most successful promotional campaign in the history of Las Vegas, it was also the most controversial. It prompted sanctions and fines from casino-industry regulators, but not before generating enough seed money to fund early construction of the $550 million Stratosphere Tower, Hotel & Casino. Of all of Stupak's big ideas, the Stratosphere Tower was the biggest. It was to be the tower to end all towers, the greatest mousetrap in a city of great mousetraps. But the tallest observation tower in the country was erected on a wobbly financial foundation of oppressive interest rates and sky-high debt, which ultimately turned the no-lose proposition into one of Las Vegas' most high-profile flops.

Download or read book Dom of Las Vegas written by Tricia Owens and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethan Winter has known since he was a kid that he wants to work for the FBI. Until then he's stuck modeling underwear and photographing cheating spouses for a private investigator. But when a trip to Las Vegas for a security conference brings him into contact with the magnificently dominant Maxmillian Poole, Ethan finds himself faced with a dilemma: pursue his childhood dream or become the partner of a man who seems to know him inside and out, a man who offers him a life any submissive would crawl for.

Download or read book Hello Las Vegas written by Martha Day Zschock and published by Commonwealth Editions. This book was released on 2019-06-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Colorful and Fun Tour of Las Vegas for the Littlest Explorers