As exhilarating as a high-stakes game of craps.
Las Vegas, and how it got that way.
Wall Street Journal columnist Binkley focuses on the three visionaries—dissimilar in temperament, sensibility and manner—who have returned the luster and glamour to Sin City after its benighted tenure as a tacky family vacation spot. Casino magnate Steve Wynn (the Mirage, the Bellagio) receives the lion’s share of the attention—and for good reason. Charismatic, voluble, driven and, tragically, slowly going blind, Wynn assumes the dimensions of a tragic Shakespearean king, obsessively building overwhelmingly deluxe pleasure palaces filled with fine art and world-class entertainment, spas and restaurants in an orgy of hubris and overspending. His nemesis, Kirk Kerkorian (MGM Grand), is in every way his opposite: a fastidious, self-effacing operator who lives for the killer deal and brokers multibillion-dollar transactions well into his 80s. Finally there is Gary Loveman, a clean-living former economics professor who revolutionized the gaming industry with impossibly complex consumer behavior-predicting formulas targeting low-rollers, sending the revenues for the down-market Harrah’s chain into the stratosphere. The most interesting bits come when things go wrong: The sad story of the misguided attempt to open a modern, ultra-luxe supercasino in Mississippi is, as rendered by Binkley, a small comic classic of class confusion and cultural misunderstanding, rich in schadenfreude. The author has a novelist’s instinct for character development and taut, suspenseful storytelling, infusing the subject with all of the drama, verve and what-happens-next imperative of a classic Scorsese epic. It’s a quintessentially American story, full of money, ego, competition, vice and the stubborn belief that transcendence is just around the next corner, waiting for someone with the vision and guts to grab it.
As exhilarating as a high-stakes game of craps.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0236-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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