Weird Las Vegas and Nevada

Weird Las Vegas and Nevada PDF Author: Joe Oesterle
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781402739408
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
A travel guide to Las Vegas that also focusses on the neglection of its historic places.

Weird Las Vegas and Nevada

Weird Las Vegas and Nevada PDF Author: Joe Oesterle
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781402739408
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
A travel guide to Las Vegas that also focusses on the neglection of its historic places.

The Strip

The Strip PDF Author: Stefan Al
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026203574X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
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.

Las Vegas

Las Vegas PDF Author: Eugene P. Moehring
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
ISBN: 0874176476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
The meteoric rise of Las Vegas from a remote Mormon outpost to an international entertainment center was never a sure thing. In its first decades, the town languished, but when Nevada legalized casino gambling in 1931, Las Vegas met its destiny. This act—combined with the growing popularity of the automobile, cheap land and electricity, and changing national attitudes toward gambling—led to the fantastic casinos and opulent resorts that became the trademark industry of the city and created the ambiance that has made Las Vegas an icon of pleasure. This volume celebrates the city’s unparalleled growth, examining both the development of its gaming industry and the creation of an urban complex that over two million people proudly call home. Here are the colorful characters who shaped the city as well as the political, business, and civic decisions that influenced its growth. The story extends chronologically from the first Paiute people to the construction of the latest megaresorts, and geographically far beyond the original township to include the several municipalities that make up today’s vast metropolitan Las Vegas area.

Las Vegas Little Black Book

Las Vegas Little Black Book PDF Author: David Demontmollin
Publisher: Justin, Charles & Co.
ISBN: 193211243X
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The bachelor party/guy's weekend has become a staple of the Las Vegas strip. The Las Vegas Little Black Book knows what men want from their weekend in Sin City, where to find it, how much to pay for it and how to go home satisfied.

Leaving Las Vegas

Leaving Las Vegas PDF Author: John O'Brien
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802197299
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
This “brutal and unflinching” novel of fleeting love in Sin City inspired the film starring Nicholas Cage and Elizabeth Shue (Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City). John O’Brien’s debut novel, Leaving Las Vegas, is an emotionally wrenching story of a woman who embraces life and a man who rejects it; a powerful tale of hard luck, hard drinking, and a relationship of tenderness and destruction. An avowed alcoholic, Ben drinks away his family, friends, and, finally, his job. With deliberate resolve, he burns the remnants of his life and heads for Las Vegas to end it all in the last great binge of his hopeless life. On the Strip, he picks up Sera, a prostitute, in what might have become another excess in his self-destructive jag. Instead, their chance meeting becomes a respite on the road to oblivion as they form a bond that is as mysterious as it is immutable.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) PDF Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007596715
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive ...”’

Picturing Las Vegas

Picturing Las Vegas PDF Author: Linda Chase
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
ISBN: 1423604881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Through colorful photogra phs and firsthand narrative detail, Picturing Las Vegas tells the story of a city whose history mirrors that of America itself: a tale of the frontier, of corruption and greed, of beauty and loss and ineffable hope. From its hardscrabble origins, to the Golden Age of the Rat Pack, to today's mind-blowing theme-park casinos, Las Vegas is the city that has it all. Mobsters. Mormons. Elvis and Wayne Newton, Siegfried and Roy. It's a place where change is the one constant, and where the pursuit of happiness is the only law. In the words of writer Chuck Palahniuk, it's the place that "looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night." Linda Chase is the author of Surfing Women of the Waves and grew up in Las Vegas. She lives in California. Explores the fascinating story of Sin City, from its origins as a desert outpost to today's eye-popping fantasyland

Young Las Vegas

Young Las Vegas PDF Author: Joan Burkhart Whitely
Publisher: Stephens Press, LLC
ISBN: 1932173323
Category : Las Vegas (Nev.)
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The Las Vegas we know was conceived -- if anybody really conceived it -- in 1931, when Nevada liberalised its divorce and gambling laws, which would ultimately transform the city into America's playground for grown-ups. It was also the year an unprecedented engineering project began, that would turn the Colorado River from a wild killer stream to a wild reservoir that waters not only California vegetables but also sprawling Las Vegas suburbs. From 1905 to 1931, Las Vegas was still a tiny oasis in a big, dangerous desert. Its isolated people made their own swamp coolers, their own entertainment and sometimes their own whiskey. The author, Joan Burkhardt Whitely, enlisted older Las Vegans to help capture the memories of a Mojave Mayberry where neighbours took care of each other, not merely because no one else would, but because it was their hometown, and they cared.

Elvis in Vegas

Elvis in Vegas PDF Author: Richard Zoglin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501151207
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
“Outstanding pop-culture history.” —Newsday The “smart and zippy account” (The Wall Street Journal) of how Las Vegas saved Elvis and Elvis saved Las Vegas in the greatest musical comeback of all time. Elvis’s 1969 opening night in Vegas was his first time back on a live stage in more than eight years. His career had gone sour—bad movies, mediocre pop songs that no longer made the charts—and he’d been dismissed by most critics as over-the-hill. But in Vegas he played the biggest showroom in the biggest hotel in the city, drawing more people for his four-week engagement than any other show in Vegas history. His performance got rave reviews; “Suspicious Minds,” the song he introduced there, gave him his first number-one hit in seven years; and Elvis became Vegas’s biggest star. Over the next seven years, he performed more than 600 shows there, and sold out every one. Las Vegas was changed, too. By the end of the ‘60s, Vegas’ golden age—when the Rat Pack led a glittering array of stars who made it the nation’s premier live-entertainment center—was losing its luster. Elvis created a new kind of Vegas show: an over-the-top, rock-concert extravaganza. He set a new bar for Vegas performers, with the biggest salary, the biggest musical production, and the biggest promotion campaign the city had ever seen. He opened the door to a new generation of pop/rock artists and brought a new audience to Vegas—not the traditional well-heeled older gamblers, but a mass audience from Middle America that Vegas depends on for its success to this day. At once “a fascinating history of Vegas as gambling capital, celebrity playground, mob hangout, [and] entertainment Valhalla” (Rolling Stone) and the incredible “tale of how the King got his groove back” (Associated Press), Elvis in Vegas is a classic feel-good story for the ages.

Las Vegas Then and Now

Las Vegas Then and Now PDF Author: Su Kim Chung
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 1911670107
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
Las Vegas Then and Now pairs vintage shots from 100 years of the city's history with the same view today.