Las Vegas is many cities to many people, and that’s part of what makes it such a challenge to capture in a book.
For many, it exists as much in the past as present. For some, it’s an irresistible canvas on which to paint a dystopian future. Fortunately for us, some very good writers continue to tell the Las Vegas story as they perceive it.
But please don’t take my word for it. Check out some of the books I’ve been reading, and see for yourself.
— At the top this year’s list is Douglas Unger’s Dream City, a novel that Honoré de Balzac might have written if he’d been a Vegas denizen during the Strip’s corporate casino boom years leading up to the Great Recession. The author of four novels, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Leaving the Land, Unger is the co-founder of the Creative Writing International program at UNLV.
His exploration of the manners and morals, such as they are, of casino culture’s executive offices has a ring of authenticity that only a writer with keen insight and better contacts can possess. Unger takes the reader behind the scenes to a land where the ends almost always justify the means. The rewards may be great, but the cost of pursuing the dream is greater still.
Can a sense of morality, and love itself, survive the dream?
The setting and characters of Dream City may appear hauntingly familiar to some readers, but Unger’s approach transcends the easy façade of Las Vegas as a kind of literary lounge. As those who live there know well, you’ll find very dark nights behind all the bright lights. (University of Nevada Press)
— Early in Jarret Keene’s break-neck-paced novel Hammer of the Dogs, our narrator briefly explains the state of play in post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, where kickass heroine Lash makes Lara Croft: Tomb Raider look like she’s standing still as she masters the nuances of paramilitary school against high-tech forces of evil:
“Likewise, Las Vegas had been diminished. People lived here despite the challenges, mainly because hordes of murderous nomads stalked the valley’s edge. In return for relative safety and online access, primarily crop price updates to plan food budgets, all the remaining inhabitants who had any paid with their children.”
And I thought I went to a tough school.
Fortunately for readers of this entertaining tale by another talented Las Vegas author, Lash has their backs as she battles to protect the weak against long odds in a high-tech world of killer drones and villains of many stripes. Keene is an assistant professor at UNLV who teaches American literature and the graphic novel, which I suspect is where Hammer of the Dogs gets its spirit and energy. (University of Nevada Press)
— Lissa Townsend Rodgers writes about a very different kind of woman in her entertaining Shameless: Women of the Underworld. (Huntington Press) With chapters on a variety of mob molls and fast-living ladies from a previous era, it provides a reminder that notorious partnerships were precarious no matter whether you were the one pulling the trigger.
Of particular interest for me were the chapters on Geri Rosenthal, who was depicted by Sharon Stone in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, and the late great Liz Renay, the former Mickey Cohen girlfriend who starred in several drive-in movies and was featured in the John Waters classic Desperate Living. Rosenthal was a tragedy. “Lucky Liz of Las Vegas,” as her license plate frame read, was a one-in-a-million character I knew as a friend.
— Investigative journalist Brian Joseph explores another side of Las Vegas in his book Vegas Concierge: Sex Trafficking, Hip Hop, and Corruption in America. (Roman & Littlefield) The seamy underworld of street prostitution has long been a staple of fly-in reporters looking for salacious stories, but Joseph makes a valiant effort to investigate the complex relationship — some of it corrupt — between the law enforcement and the local pimp culture in a city that has shown painfully little conscience when it comes to the sex trade.
Using cases torn from the headlines, Joseph’s investigative reporting goes further to raise serious questions about how Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department does its job and whether the community at large much cares. Along the way, he recounts the sordid story of hip hop promoter and Las Vegas escort service operator Jamal Rashid, also known as Mally Mall, whose free-wheeling hustle went on right under the noses of the vice squad for years.
— It’s not specifically about Las Vegas, but Pat Hickey’s literally spirited Here and Hereafter: Nevada Voices on Life and the Great Beyond (Jack Bacon & Company) offers the personal views of an impressive list of nearly three dozen of the state’s movers-and-shakers on the subject of their place in eternity. Among them: politicians Harry Reid and Brian Sandoval, journalists Jon Ralston and Steve Sebelius, business tycoons Elaine Wynn and Lance Gilman, magician/atheist Penn Jillette, and former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson.
A moment from former state Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa’s interview is representative of the more enlightened and thoughtful views. She keeps a copy of Buddha’s Little Handbook handy and says, “I’ve worked at coming to the point where I can deal with life’s three great choices: You can accept things, change things, or remove the things that trouble you.”
I also liked the part where she said, “If there is a heaven, I hope everybody I have ever loved will be waiting there for me. … I will miss the best garage sale ever when they sell all my stuff.”
The interviews are interesting, and just reading the table of contents made me smile and ponder a burning question. Do some of these people really think they’re going to heaven?
Let’s just say it’s complicated.
— But it’s not all corporate intrigue, post-apocalyptic derring-do, sex-traffickers and prognostications about eternity. I am admittedly biased, but these days the Las Vegas that’s easiest for me to love is the one that Silver State political legend Richard Bryan recalls in his endearing memoir, My Life in Nevada Politics. (University of Nevada Press) It’s filled with Bryan’s self-deprecating humor and tales from his remarkable career in public service. It also describes a small-town Las Vegas of the 1940s and ‘50s that no longer exists outside the pages of the book.
Bryan grew up in the great American boomtown at the dawn of the nuclear age. As a schoolboy he made his life’s goal clear to his classmates: He wanted to be the governor of Nevada. In time, he would accomplish that feat and many more in a career in public service that has touched five decades.
With explosive growth in Las Vegas and atomic blasts at the Nevada Test Site, he captures that time of great change with candor and a keen eye for detail.
Collaborating with him on this book was one of the pleasures of my writing life. I hope his story gets the wide readership it deserves.
John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.
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