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
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova’s many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her...
The polymathic Popova, presiding genius behind brainpickings.org, looks at some of the forgotten heroes of science, art, and culture.
“There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives,” writes the author at the outset. She closes with the realization that while we individuals may die, the beauty of our lives and work, if meaningful, will endure: “What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust." In between, she peppers thoughtful, lucid consideration of acts of the imagination with stories that, if ever aired before, are too little known. Who would have remembered that of all the details of the pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler’s life, one was racing across Germany to come to the aid of his widowed mother, who had been charged with witchcraft? The incident ably frames Kepler’s breaking out of a world governed by superstition, “a world in which God is mightier than nature, the Devil realer and more omnipresent than gravity,” and into a radical, entirely different world governed by science. That world saw many revolutions and advances ahead of the general population, as when, in 1865, Vassar College appointed as its first professor of astronomy a woman, Maria Mitchell, who combined a brilliant command of science with a yearning for poetry. So it was with Rachel Carson, the great ecologist, whose love for a woman lasted across a life burdened with terrible illness, and Emily Dickinson, who might have been happier had her own love for a woman been realized. (As it was, Popova notes, the world was ready for Dickinson: A book of her poems published four years after her death sold 500 copies on the first day of publication.) Throughout her complex, consistently stimulating narrative, the author blends biography, cultural criticism, and journalism to forge elegant connections: Dickinson feeds in to Carson, who looks back to Mitchell, who looks forward to Popova herself, and with plenty of milestones along the way: Kepler, Goethe, Pauli, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne….
A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova’s many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her many more.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4813-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
