What images come to mind when you think of Las Vegas?
Mobsters and showgirls, magicians and tigers, multimillion-dollar
poker games and prizefights; towering signboards that light up the
night in front of ever more spectacular casino hotels.
But real people live here, too--over a million today, two million
tomorrow. Greater Las Vegas has long been the fastest growing
metropolitan area in America. And almost every aspect of its
citizens' lives is influenced by the almighty power of the gambling
industry.
A team of fifteen reporters led by David Littlejohn, together with
prize winning photo-journalist Eric Gran, studied the "real" Las
Vegas--the city beyond the Strip and Downtown--for the better part
of a year. They talked to teenagers (whose suicide and dropout
rates frighten parents), senior citizens (many of whom spend their
days playing bingo and the slots), Mexican immigrants (who build
the new houses and clean the hotels), homeless people and angry
blacks, as well as local police, active Christians, city officials,
and prostitutes. They looked into the local churches, the powerful
labor unions, pawn shops, the real estate boom, defiant ranchers to
the north, and dire predictions that the city is about to run out
of water.
Proud Las Vegans claim that theirs is just a friendly southwestern
boomtown--"the finest community I have ever lived in," says Bishop
Daniel Walsh, who comes from San Francisco. But their picture of
Las Vegas as a vibrant, civic-minded metropolis conflicts with
evidence of transiency, rootlessness, political impotence, and
social dysfunction.
In this close-up investigation of the real lives being led in
America's most tourist-jammed, gambling-driven city, readers will
discover a Las Vegas very different from the one they may have seen
or imagined.
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