Played Out on the Strip

Played Out on the Strip
Author: Janis L. McKay
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2016-04-12
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1943859035

From 1940 to 1989, nearly every hotel on the Las Vegas Strip employed a full-time band or orchestra. After the late 1980s, when control of the casinos changed hands from independent owners to corporations, almost all of these musicians found themselves unemployed. Played Out on the Strip traces this major shift in the music industry through extensive interviews with former musicians. In 1989, these soon-to-be unemployed musicians went on strike. Janis McKay charts the factors behind this strike, which was precipitated by several corporate hotel owners moving to replace live musicians with synthesizers and taped music, a strategic decision made in order to save money. The results of this transitional period in Las Vegas history were both long-lasting and far-reaching for the entertainment industry. With its numerous oral history interviews and personal perspectives from the era, this book will appeal to readers interested in Las Vegas history, music history, and labor issues.

Gambling on a Dream

Gambling on a Dream
Author: Lynn M. Zook
Publisher: America Through Time
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 9781634990677

Everyone thinks they know the history of the Las Vegas Strip. But the real story is both fascinating and not well known. What was there before the Bellagio, the Wynn, the Venetian, or those empty plots of land that look out of place? Why is the Flamingo one of the oldest and most surviving hotels on the boulevard? From conception to implosion, you get the detailed histories of the hotels built during those formative years, including the El Rancho Vegas, Hotel Last Frontier, Flamingo, Thunderbird, Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn, Sahara, Sands, Royal Nevada, Riviera, and the Dunes. Included in these histories are architectural designs, the neon signage, and how each of the hotels evolved. This book also includes rarely seen, historic imagery. The dreamers, who saw the future like few others and who built these hotels, helped turn a five-mile stretch of blacktop highway into the Entertainment Capital of the World. This is the story of the first twenty-five years of the Classic Las Vegas Strip--how it began, and how it grew.

The Strip

The Strip
Author: Stefan Al
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2017-03-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 026203574X

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.

My Week at the Blue Angel

My Week at the Blue Angel
Author: Matthew O'Brien
Publisher: Huntington Press Inc
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2011-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

A savage journey into the heart of Hunter S. Thompson's Las Vegas with the Good Doctor as tour guide. A Lord-of-the-Rings-like adventure in the city's underground flood channels. A seven-day stay at a seedy motel on East Fremont Street. The stories in My Week at the Blue Angel aren't about Steve Wynn, Cirque du Soleil, or how to play poker, and they aren't set in Caesars Palace, XS Nightclub, or a 2,000-seat showroom. They're about prostitutes, ex-cons, and the homeless, and they're set under Caesars Palace and in trailer parks and weekly motels. In this creative nonfiction collection, Matthew O'Brien--author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas--and veteran photographer Bill Hughes show a side of the city rarely seen. A side beyond the neon lights, themed facades, and motel-room doors. A side beyond the barbwire fences, No Trespassing signs, and midnight shadows.

Storming Las Vegas

Storming Las Vegas
Author: John Huddy
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2009-04-28
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0345514416

On September 20, 1998, Jose Vigoa, a child of Fidel Castro’s revolution, launched what would be the most audacious and ruthless series of high-profile casino and armored car robberies that Las Vegas had ever seen. In a brazen sixteen-month reign of terror, he and his crew would hit the crème de la crème of Vegas hotels: the MGM, the Desert Inn, the New York—New York, the Mandalay Bay, and the Bellagio. The robberies were well planned and executed, and the police–“the stupids,” as Vigoa contemptuously referred to them–were all but helpless to stop them. But Lt. John Alamshaw, the twenty-three-year veteran in charge of robbery detectives, was not giving up so easily. For him, Vigoa’s rampage was a personal affront. And he would do whatever it took, even risk his badge, to bring Vigoa down.

Winner Takes All

Winner Takes All
Author: Christina Binkley
Publisher: Hachette Books
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0316487902

From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and culture critic Christina Binkley comes an updated edition of her New York Times bestselling account of sex, drugs, and the rise of Las Vegas. With a new prologue on the rise and fall of Steve Wynn. The Strip. Home to some of the world's grandest, flashiest, and most lucrative casino resorts, Las Vegas, with its multitude of attractions, draws millions of tourists from around the world every year. But Sin City hasn't always been booming: modern Vegas exists largely thanks to the extraordinary vision, and remarkable hubris, of three competing business moguls: Kirk Kerkorian, Dr. Gary Loveman, and Steve Wynn. And in the wake of #MeToo revelations, not all empires survive. Having had personal access to all three tycoons, Binkley explains how their audacious efforts to reach the top-and to top one another-shaped the city as it stands. She takes us inside their grandest schemes, their riskiest deals, and the personalities that drove them to their greatest successes, and their most painful defeats. In this updated edition, she reveals the inside story of how Steve Wynn, the winner who took all, ultimately lost everything-twice. Sharp, insightful, and revealing, Winner Takes All is the gripping story of how billions of dollars and the unparalleled drive for power turned dreams into larger-than-life reality. "It's a great drama on the greatest stage. . . Wynn, Kerkorian, and Loveman represent three opposing business personalities, three styles of achieving success. On the Vegas Strip, they're pitted against one another like gladiators, and we've got front-row seats. Kapow!" - bestselling author Po Bronson

Tournament Bridge for Advanced Players

Tournament Bridge for Advanced Players
Author: Ken Casey
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-04-27
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1984520458

This book is about how to play bridge in a tournament. Unlike club play, the hands are typically prearranged to test your skills. This book gives a comprehensive view of the various types of hands an advanced player might expect to encounter. The various categories of hands presented will teach you when and how to use the end play, when and how to squeeze, how to handle a forcing defense, and how to handle a 41 trump split. The book will also teach you how to play a Notrump hand, such as when to hold up, how to finesse, when to spurn the finesse, when to duck at Notrump, when to avoid the danger hand, how to deceive the opponents, how to unblock, and how to handle transportation.

Suburban Xanadu

Suburban Xanadu
Author: David Schwartz G
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2003-06-03
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1136757414

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Picturing Childhood

Picturing Childhood
Author: Mark Heimermann
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1477311645

Comics and childhood have had a richly intertwined history for nearly a century. From Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie to Hergé’s Tintin (Belgium), José Escobar’s Zipi and Zape (Spain), and Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz (Germany), iconic child characters have given both kids and adults not only hours of entertainment but also an important vehicle for exploring children’s lives and the sometimes challenging realities that surround them. Bringing together comic studies and childhood studies, this pioneering collection of essays provides the first wide-ranging account of how children and childhood, as well as the larger cultural forces behind their representations, have been depicted in comics from the 1930s to the present. The authors address issues such as how comics reflect a spectrum of cultural values concerning children, sometimes even resisting dominant cultural constructions of childhood; how sensitive social issues, such as racial discrimination or the construction and enforcement of gender roles, can be explored in comics through the use of child characters; and the ways in which comics use children as metaphors for other issues or concerns. Specific topics discussed in the book include diversity and inclusiveness in Little Audrey comics of the 1950s and 1960s, the fetishization of adolescent girls in Japanese manga, the use of children to build national unity in Finnish wartime comics, and how the animal/child hybrids in Sweet Tooth act as a metaphor for commodification.

All the rage

All the rage
Author: Aaron McGruder
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2007
Genre: African American cartoonists
ISBN: 0307352668