Award-winning journalist Earley (Circumstantial Evidence, 1995, etc.) takes a long, hard look at the rejuvenated Las Vegas casino industry, from the new breed of Disney-influenced megacasinos to the still-seamy underbelly of need, misconduct, and loss. Earley is a heavyweight reporter, and he gained unprecedented access to the casinos—primarily the oft-beleaguered Circus-Circus conglomerate’so this book is densely detailed. He first reviews the bad old days of Vegas, when mobsters who built their own casinos with Teamsters Pension Funds in the 1950s were forced out by federal pressure by the 1970s, paving the way for mass mergers that both reduced the cash skimming, tax evasion, and brutality, and eradicated most components of the Las Vegas of Hunter Thompson and the Rat Pack. Earley’s central narrative concerns the decades of corporate intrigue that attended the rise of supercasino ventures like Circus-Circus, originally a —grind joint,— versus Steve Wynn’s —high-roller— establishments, like the Mirage. Beginning with Jay Sarno, a lecherous impresario who ushered in the contemporary aesthetic with Caesar’s Palace and the grotesque cement —big top— of Circus-Circus—then within eight years lost control of both—Earley documents the backstabbing and soul-selling that overtook the first generation of megacasino executives. This grim tale is interspersed with Studs Turkel’style personal narratives of casino denizens, most of them revealing and poignant. A widow visits Las Vegas to recall her deceased husband; a teenage prostitute manages to graduate from blackjack-dealer’s school; casino employees struggle with cynicism and conscience. Also more compelling than the corporate swashbuckling are chapters succinctly examining the nitty-gritty of high-tech casino operation: surveillance, security, anticheating measures, and the odd comforts demanded by gamblers. Given that Las Vegas’s latest incarnation appears to be an unstoppable cultural juggernaut, a timely and deft examination of the mechanisms, individuals, and corporate culture that transformed the once risquÇ pursuit of gambling into the glamorized, mainstreamed fantasy of —gaming.—
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-09502-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.
A charmingly pared-down life of the “boys” that grounds their dream of flight in decent character and work ethic.
There is a quiet, stoical awe to the accomplishments of these two unprepossessing Ohio brothers in this fluently rendered, skillfully focused study by two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning and two-time National Book Award–winning historian McCullough (The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, 2011, etc.). The author begins with a brief yet lively depiction of the Wright home dynamic: reeling from the death of their mother from tuberculosis in 1889, the three children at home, Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine, had to tend house, as their father, an itinerant preacher, was frequently absent. McCullough highlights the intellectual stimulation that fed these bookish, creative, close-knit siblings. Wilbur was the most gifted, yet his parents’ dreams of Yale fizzled after a hockey accident left the boy with a mangled jaw and broken teeth. The boys first exhibited their mechanical genius in their print shop and then in their bicycle shop, which allowed them the income and space upstairs for machine-shop invention. Dreams of flight were reawakened by reading accounts by Otto Lilienthal and other learned treatises and, specifically, watching how birds flew. Wilbur’s dogged writing to experts such as civil engineer Octave Chanute and the Smithsonian Institute provided advice and response, as others had long been preoccupied by controlled flight. Testing their first experimental glider took the Wrights over several seasons to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to experiment with their “wing warping” methods. There, the strange, isolated locals marveled at these most “workingest boys,” and the brothers continually reworked and repaired at every step. McCullough marvels at their success despite a lack of college education, technical training, “friends in high places” or “financial backers”—they were just boys obsessed by a dream and determined to make it reality.
An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2874-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.
A firsthand account of how the Navajo language was used to help defeat the Japanese in World War II.
At the age of 17, Nez (an English name assigned to him in kindergarten) volunteered for the Marines just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Growing up in a traditional Navajo community, he became fluent in English, his second language, in government-run boarding schools. The author writes that he wanted to serve his country and explore “the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world.” Because he was bilingual, he was one of the original 29 “code talkers” selected to develop a secret, unbreakable code based on the Navajo language, which was to be used for battlefield military communications on the Pacific front. Because the Navajo language is tonal and unwritten, it is extremely difficult for a non-native speaker to learn. The code created an alphabet based on English words such as ant for “A,” which were then translated into its Navajo equivalent. On the battlefield, Navajo code talkers would use voice transmissions over the radio, spoken in Navajo to convey secret information. Nez writes movingly about the hard-fought battles waged by the Marines to recapture Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and others, in which he and his fellow code talkers played a crucial role. He situates his wartime experiences in the context of his life before the war, growing up on a sheep farm, and after when he worked for the VA and raised a family in New Mexico. Although he had hoped to make his family proud of his wartime role, until 1968 the code was classified and he was sworn to silence. He sums up his life “as better than he could ever have expected,” and looks back with pride on the part he played in “a new, triumphant oral and written [Navajo] tradition,” his culture's contribution to victory.
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-24423-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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