Denton, Sally and Morris, Roger. The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 479 pages.

Sally Denton and Roger Morris independently enjoyed impressive careers as investigative writers, and then they got married and wrote this history of Las Vegas. From Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel to the Kennedy family, and from Mormon bankers and the Mafia to Hank Greenspun, Howard Hughes and Paul Laxalt, the events that intersect this little piece of deranged desert are too vast for even two reporters. Too many roads connect Las Vegas to other seamy stories, and there are too few pages in one book to do them justice. Within this limitation the book is successful. It spends most of its effort on a handful of personalities that were central to Las Vegas, and doesn't try to venture too far beyond a colorful snapshot, as opposed to a smoking-gun history.

There's no Conspiracy to uncover here. Rather there's an entire chain of mini-conspiracies, supported by a corrupt culture that knows nothing else. Washington DC is similar, although it employs diplomats and spin doctors instead of blunt-talking, drug-money mobsters, and boasts patriotic memorials instead of gambling glitz. Both get a steady stream of tasteless, vapid tourists. The authors vote for Las Vegas, though, as the "first city of the twenty-first century."
ISBN 0-375-40130-X

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