Volume 43, Number 1 · January 11, 1996
Learning from Las Vegas
By Al Alvarez
The Luck Business: The Devastating Consequences and Broken Promises of America's Gambling Explosion
by Robert Goodman
Martin Kessler Books/Free Press, 273 pp., $23.00
The Black Book and the Mob: The Untold Story of the Control of Nevada's Casinos
by Ronald A. Farrell, by Carole Case
University of Wisconsin Press, 286 pp., $44.00; $17.95 (paper)
Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas
by Nicholas Pileggi
Simon and Schuster, 363 pp., $24.00
Casino
a film directed by Martin Scorsese, screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi, by Martin Scorsese
Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino King Steve Wynn
by John L. Smith
Barricade Books, 352 pp., $24.00
Fifteen years ago, when I first began going regularly to Las Vegas, the town was strictly for adults. Sometimes you would see stunned waifs wandering around Glitter Gulch downtown or asleep on the carpeted sidewalk outside the Golden Nugget while their parents blew their week's wages, but there was only one casino that made any pretense of catering to children. That was Circus Circus, which offered them a mezzanine crammed with carnival sideshows and video games, and a view of the casino and trapeze artists swinging around over the heads of the gamblers below. The place seemed to have been designed as a gambling-aversion cure by an unusually sadistic behaviorist. It was bewildering, batteringly noisy, and circular, a new level of Dante's hell. My small daughter was taken there once by the mother of another girl she had met at the swimming pool of a neighboring casino. The mother gave the kids ten dollars each and went off to play blackjack. When the money ran out they went down to find her. Since it was an offense for a minor to enter the gambling area, the girls—both nine years old, and with long blond hair like Tenniel's Alice—were promptly arrested by a security guard.
Review, 5167 words
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