The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America
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The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America Book
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| Customer Reviews |
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Rating:  - History of Vegas. Reads like a college class.
This is a complete history of Vegas from the slant of the author. While there is plenty of information, that's part of the problem. Sometimes there is just too much information. With research this voluminous, the authors had to make some decisions about what areas to cover. Generally, they focused on bankers, journalists, politicians and gangsters. An inordinate amount of time was spent tying the gangsters to the CIA and plots to kill Castro. But is that really part of Las Vegas history or national politics? You should also be forewarned that the number of pages allocated over the past 20 years appeared to be much lower than coverage from '45 to '70.Overall, I became somewhat bored although I did learn quite a bit. The FBI agent Yablonsky trying to work in an environment where many times he was considered an enemy was particularly interesting. Also, the journalist who wrote about Steve Wynn but not is effectively muzzled by Wynn's legal action shows where the true power is in Vegas. Sometimes too much information detracts and for me that was the case here. I enjoyed the book "Casino" more which focused just on the gangsters move to Vegas as well as their eventual demise.
Rating:  - The history you don't know, and would never know
This book should be categorized as American History instead of being assigned to the social niche of Las Vegas gangster lore. The implied dynamic between uniquely American styles of Good and Evil is expressed in Miltonian terms, where Evil is more than simple badness, it also is endlessly energizing and fascinating. Denton and Morris propose what few Americans would willingly admit. The Mobs and sub Mobs in this country are not a thing apart, but very much part and parcel of who we are. The suggestion is here that we must grow past the _light on the hill_ fantasy of American purity and exceptionalism and accept the harsh truths of the real America without flinching. The secondary suggestion I think Denton and Morris put foreward is that America has operated in an atmosphere of denial. The psychology of denial was one of the consequences of the cold war era, when overt criticism of the American system was judged as seditious or unpatriotic. The Las Vegas mechanism was, as the authors illustrate, connected to the McCarthy period, red scares, xenophobia, atomic testing ( guests in Vegas hotels paid premium to have views of the desert bomb tests )in a morbid symbiosis. The shadowy figure of Meyer Lansky haunts the entire scene as the mastermind who may have so effectively compromised J.Edgar Hoover that virtually none of the mob activities would be admitted to, much less prosecuted. This book is In Your Face history, not abstract chin stroking. Too controvesial for your average university, where it is the very book that ought to be assigned. You won't be able to get a complete handle on the American condition without taking The Money an The Power into consideration. If you can find it in the used section of your local bookstore, read Dark Victory : Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob by Dan E. Moldea too. The picture will begin to flesh out.
Rating:  - a powerful bias
Excellent detail, thoroughly documented. The book covers a wide range of significant figures in the city's colorful past. The major problem is that the authors stretch to fit the past 50 years of US history into the Las Vegas nutshell. Perhaps the bigger problem is the all encompassing political bias of the authors (conservative = reactionary) and the absolute lack of questioning of the cultural norms that the city's rise has supplanted.
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