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First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
- Sales Rank: #2362106 in Books
- Published on: 2002-02-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.30" w x 6.10" l, 1.55 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 368 pages
From Library Journal
In this thoughtful study, Rothman (history, Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas) provides a detailed history of a uniquely American city. The subject of urban planning and design is enriched by Rothman's focus on the social history of the city, including its architecture, economics, government, labor issues, transportation, environmental policy, and immigration situation. Rothman argues that Las Vegas survives by responding to whatever source of prosperity is available, whether it is the U.S. military or the gaming industry. In Las Vegas's malleability, he sees the future of all U.S. cities, along with attendant issues of social isolation and environmental abuse. His empathetic exploration of working-class Latino lives is especially rewarding. Recommended for academic and public library collections emphasizing urban studies, American history, and the Latino experience. Paula R. Dempsey, DePaul Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Rothman, a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a frequent commentator on the local culture, presents a thorough study of Las Vegas, a city with about as quirky a history as any in the U.S. Though Las Vegas was once just a whistle- stop on the L.A. railroad, loose regulations on adult pleasures and a lock on water access brought in Mob "shoebox money" to finance this paradise of vice in the desert. It was never a secret that Vegas was a syndicate-run town, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as city and state authorities looked the other way, the money poured in, but it always remained tainted. Then Howard Hughes bought half the town, and legislation opened up to allow free corporate access. The mobsters were practically run out of town, opening the way for the theme-park-like atmosphere that pervades today. Rothman gets inside the psyche of the Vegas mystique, where luxury is affordable to all, everyone is a star, and entertainment is king like nowhere else. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"(Rothman) treasures the moment when Jerry Tarkanian (a towel-chewing stoic) took his Runnin' Rebels to the N.C.A.A. basketball finals, and defeated Duke, despite the "snotty" sign borne by some Duke supporters: "Welcome, fellow student-athletes." This informative and useful book comes loaded...there is a wealth of practical detail....This book will teach you something startling on nearly every page."
-New York Times Book Review
"A brilliant interpretation of the supernova of American Cities."
-Mike Davis, author of "City of Quartz
"In this thoughtful study, Rothman provides a detailed history of a uniquely American city. The subject of urban planning and design is enriched by Rothman's focus on the social history of the city, including its architecture, economics, government, labor issues, transportation, environmental policy, and immigration situation....His empathetic exploration of working class Latino lives is especially rewarding."
-Library Journal
"Rothman masterfully melds painstaking research, relevant anecdotes and well-chosen interviews to illuminate large social, economic and cultural themes and show where they fit into Las Vegas. Unlike others who have tried to capture the city, Rothman doesn't traffic in conspiracy theories or florid prose to make Las Vegas seem larger or darker than life. Instead, he has produced a sprightly written book that took him out of the ivory tower and onto the streets to produce a compelling and accurate picute of the Neon Metropolis."
-Jon Ralston
"Most of the information we receive about modern places is as ignorant as it is superficial, and yet from the very capital of superficiality and glitz, Las Vegas, HalRothman has paradoxically delivered a book that is engaged, funny, smart and historically informed. Las Vegas, Rothman tells us, represents socially sanctioned deviance. The deviance in Neon Metropolis we expect to find, but Rothman delivers much more. This is a book about changing American culture and the surprising ways that Las Vegas, which is different from the rest of America, reveals so much about the United States in a new century."
-Richard White, Stanford University
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Neon Metropolis
By Alan Hess
An insightful work. Neon Metropolis is an essential antidote to the many critics who fly to Las Vegas for a quick visit, and leave with biases undisturbed and nothing useful to say.
What sets Rothman apart? He combines academic investigation with close observation, over time, of how this resort town is turning into one of the most successful and popular cities in the United States.
Key to the success of this book is the fact that Rothman lives in this city, where he teaches history at UNLV. He has lived in the brand new subdivisions which excite the derision of tourist-critics who cannot fathom that such planned communities could be anything other than hideously pathological. Rothman, on the other hand, has watched these communities grow with time. His children have played in the nascent sports leagues; he has ridden the mass transit; he has seen how people carve a real community to raise families - for two or three generations now - out of unconventional and even unlikely material. He has tracked political movements and talked to his neighbors at Starbucks. And while these communities may not be perfect - Rothman has an academic's balanced powers of evaluation - they do work. This information is of wider interest as well; Rothman discusses the many ways that Las Vegas is a prototype in developing the emerging urban-suburban cities that we find across the nation.
This book reveals an intriguing urban landscape. We learn how the earlier Las Vegas of the Mob shaped not only its gambling economy, but created its hospitals, churches and other institutional urban infrastructure. We then learn how the Las Vegas of Wall Street (after Hilton, Holiday Inn and other corporations became the major stakeholders) built the foundations for the enormous growth in size, prestige and influence over the last twenty years.
Along the way we see how the many threads of a real city - unions, immigrants, a strong middle-class economy, civic and business leaders, and the city's self-conceptions - have been woven together. Rothman helpfully compares Las Vegas to Detroit's growth along with another booming new industry earlier in the century.
This book is a dose of well-researched reality which should be read by anyone concerned with the health and direction of American cities.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Las Vegas Economically Malleable? NOT!
By A Customer
One of the central theses of this book is that Las Vegas has miraculously "adopted" to the changing economy and has thus prospered more than other major U.S. cities by taking advantage of emerging social and economic trends. The author imagines that Las Vegas is some sort of highly malleable economic miracle machine that rolls with the punches, survives and prospers hugely while other places dependant on more recession-sensitive industries such as technology, manufacturing, and medical research ebb and flow. What nonsense!
Las Vegas, and to an even greater extent its cradle of growth Clark County, have never adopted to ANY emerging economic trend, unless you count the undesirable trend of industrial-scale gaming penetration together with huge resort casinos into every corner of the city, including formerly-protected residential neighborhoods. Quite the contrary, the city has never done anything other than repackage marketing themes that sell gambling and an increasingly aggressive sex industry, advertisements for which pervade just about available public space one views from an automobile. Hide you eyes, kids!
Las Vegas' economic success is certainly not based on economic malleability and adaptability. It is based on 30 years worth of cheap housing, abundant low wage jobs, weak consumer protection, and almost non-existent restraints on development of raw land. Throw in a state and a county government run for the benefit of the gaming industry and developers and voila! The "city of the future", is a vast wasteland of cookie-cutter housing tracts, endless strip malls, and a urban facade often described as "franchise architecture". This is not my vision of a desirable future. And increasingly, many observers in southern Nevada are beginning to realize that Las Vegas is rapidly becoming unlivable due to the city's rush into this future.
For those who have not moved to this place yet, let's hope that Las Vegas is not the future of American urban life, but will remain what is has always been: an aberration maintained solely by unrestrained growth and legalized gambling.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Does Not Reflect Las Vegas' Deep Seated Problems
By A Customer
READER NOTE: See the New York Times article ([...]) of 5/30/04 for independent corroboration of my review, written approximately 6 months earlier.
This book is a good read, successfully revising many of the standard clich?s about Las Vegas, and therefore is a welcome change from so much superficial writing. However, like much of the blatant boosterim that passes for news about Las Vegas, the book essentially ignores the myriad deep-seated social problems out-of-state readers will not be aware of. Nevada in general and Las Vegas in particular are at or near the bottom in many indicators of public life, environmental, and educational health and wellness. The state has even been referred to as the "Alabama of the West" because of its weak state government, relatively poor public health, and poor per capita finance for secondary and higher education. As a practical matter, due to local governments that fail to place even slight restrictions on growth, the Las Vegas Valley is a currently a seething caldron of runaway development, overcrowded schools, roadways approaching gridlock, and increasing water shortages. A pall of dust and smog frequently obscure the surrounding mountains, a direct result of explosive and largely unplanned growth. Rothman's book is entertaining and illuminating about the Las Vegas urban culture. However, it fails to rigorously examine severe underlying problems that heavily influence the quality of present and future life in Las Vegas, in favor of unfounded admiration cloaked in academic-style historical analysis.
A few examples:
? Las Vegas has the highest rate of high school dropouts in the U.S. entering its labor force.
? Las Vegas has one of the lowest percentages of persons in the U.S. with bachelors degrees, given the size of its population, in its labor force. As a University of Nevada - Las Vegas sociologist recently said, you don't think of highly educated people when you think of Las Vegas.
? Las Vegas and Nevada have one of the highest rate of childhood dental problems.
? Las Vegas and Nevada have one of the highest suicide rates and AIDS infection rates in the U.S.
? Las Vegas and southern Nevada have no public mental health hospitals.
? Southern Nevada's only Level I trauma recently closed, but later opened after state intervention, due to physicians leaving the state because of malpractice premiums.
? Three Clark County, Nevada commissioners are facing federal charges for accepting bribes to aid the owner of a local strip club. One other has accepted plea bargains on a similar charge.
? After years of rhetoric about the need to diversity its economy, Las Vegas is more than ever wedded to and dependant on the gaming industry. Other western cities (Albuquerque, Boulder, Salt Lake City, Phoenix) are far ahead in luring technology-based businesses.
This old problem is rooted in the state's lack of a recognized research university coupled with a somewhat accurate image among the sophisticated technology industry as an unimaginative playground of retirees, second-rate schools, gambling, booze, and the flamboyant sex-as-spectacle tourism industry. Can these built-in barriers to becoming a city recognized for something other than slot machines at car washes ever be overcome? This book is completely silent on that topic. So, read this book, but bear in mind Las Vegas and Nevada continue to be places with long standing social, political, economic, educational, and environmental shortcomings usually ignored or not even acknowleged by the elected leadership.
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