Suburban Xanadu

Institution. Remarkably detailed and entertaining, Suburban Xanadu tells us a great deal about popular leisure in America, and why the suburban ideal has become so dominant in our social life. Book jacket.

The most complete single-source collection on gambling ever assembled gives readers access to the best possible information about one of the fastest growing industries in the world. The International Encyclopedia of Gambling seeks to explain the gambling phenomenon through an in-depth exploration of gambling operations around the world. More than 300 entries reflect the global stretch of the industry as they examine games, venues, players and other leading figures, legal issues, the history of gaming, and the literature on the subject. The work is enhanced with a dozen contributed articles on gambling-related topics, including commentaries on the history and growth of Las Vegas and a description of major law cases involving gambling. Coverage includes Internet gambling and a section incorporating reviews of more than 50 films about gambling.

Monte Carlo and Las Vegas have become synonymous with casino gambling. Both destinations featured it as part of a broad variety of leisure and consumption opportunities that normalized games of chance and created emotional atmospheres that supported the hedonistic aspects of gambling. Urban spaces and architecture were carefully designed to enable a rapid growth of the casino industry and produce experiences on previous unimaginable scale. Feeling Lucky, is a “making of story,” about cities which acquired a strange and captivating allure of mystery around them. It is more than a mere descriptive account, however. Combining urban history, the history of consumption, and sociological approaches it presents a compelling comparative history of Monte Carlo and the Las Vegas Strip between the 1860s and 1970s. Paul Franke takes the reader on a journey from arriving at the cities, through the carefully planned urban environments and into the famous casinos. The analysis follows the paths contemporary gamblers would have taken, right to the gambling tables and to the shifting gambling practices across a century. Franke shows that casino entrepreneurs succeeded in producing and selling gambling experiences by controlling spaces, adapt leisure practices and appeal to specific markets. Gamblers on the other hand regarded Monte Carlo and Las Vegas as places to engage in games of chance that would allow them to preserve their political, cultural, and moral identities.

The State of Sex is a study of Nevada’s brothels that situates the nation's only legal brothel industry in the political economy of contemporary tourism. Nevada is part of the "new American heartland," as its pastimes, people, and politics have become more central to the nation. The rise of a service and leisure economy over the past sixty years has propelled sexuality into the heart of contemporary markets. Yet, neoliberal laws in the United States promote business but limit sexual commerce. How have Nevada's legal brothels survived, while the rest of the country criminalizes prostitution? How do brothels operate? Who works in them? This book brings social theory on globalizing economies, politics, leisure consumption, and emotional labor in interactive service work together with research on contemporary prostitution and sexual commerce. The authors employ an innovative, multi-method sociological approach, combining historical analysis of how the brothels came to be with over a decade's worth of ethnographic research on the current state of the industry.

When Pittsburgh socialite Laura Corey rolled into Reno, Nevada, in 1905 for a six-month stay, her goal was a divorce from the president of U.S. Steel. Her visit also provided a provocative glimpse into the city's future. With its rugged landscape and rough-edged culture, Reno had little to offer early twentieth-century visitors besides the gambling and prostitution that had remained unregulated since Nevada's silver-mining heyday. But the possibility of easy divorce attracted national media attention, East Coast notables, and Hollywood stars, and soon the "Reno Cure" was all the rage. Almost overnight, Reno was on the map. Alicia Barber traces the transformation of Reno's reputation from backward railroad town to the nationally known "Sin Central"—as Garrison Keillor observed, a place where you could see things that you wouldn't want to see in your own hometown. Chronicling the city's changing fortunes from the days of the Comstock Lode, she describes how city leaders came to embrace an identity as "The Biggest Little City in the World" and transform their town into a lively tourist mecca. Focusing on the evolution of urban reputation, Barber carefully distinguishes between the image that a city's promoters hope to manufacture and the impression that outsiders actually have. Interweaving aspects of urban identity, she shows how sense of place, promoted image, and civic reputation intermingled and influenced each other—and how they in turn shaped the urban environment. Quickie divorces notwithstanding, Reno's primary growth engine was gambling; modern casinos came to dominate the downtown landscape. When mainstream America balked, Reno countered by advertising "tax freedom" and natural splendor to attract new residents. But by the mid-seventies, unchecked growth and competition from Las Vegas had initiated a downslide that persisted until a carefully crafted series of special events and the rise of recreational tourism began to attract new breeds of tourists. Barber's engaging story portrays Reno as more than a second-string Las Vegas, having pioneered most of the attractions-gaming and prizefighting, divorces and weddings-that made the larger city famous. As Reno continues to remold itself to weather the shifting winds of tourism and growth, Barber's book provides a cautionary tale for other cities hoping to ride the latest consumer trends.

In this gripping ethnography, Jeffrey J. Sallaz goes behind the scenes of the global casino industry to investigate the radically different worlds of work and leisure he found in identically designed casinos in the United States and South Africa. Seamlessly weaving political and economic history with his own personal experience, Sallaz provides a riveting account of two years spent working among both countries' casino dealers, pit bosses, and politicians. While the popular imagination sees the Nevada casino as a hedonistic world of consumption, The Labor of Luck shows that the "Vegas experience" is made possible only through a variety of systems regulating labor, capital, and consumers, and that because of these complex dynamics, the Vegas casino cannot be seamlessly picked up and replicated elsewhere. Sallaz's fresh and path-breaking approach reveals how neo-liberal versus post-colonial forms of governance produce divergent worlds at the tables, and how politics, profits, and pleasure have come together to shape everyday life in the new economy.

American historians and anyone interested in the history of labor or Las Vegas will find this account highly original, insightful, and even-handed.

The return of Macao from the Portuguese administration to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1999 marks the beginning of its transformation in the 21st century. Macao was confronted with various issues concerning then existing political system, economic downturn and gangland violence during the transition period. Beijing put Macao under the "One country, Two Systems" and implemented a wide variety of measures in order to restore its law and order as well as to recover its tourism dependent economy. Gradually, Macao transformed itself to "Las Vegas of the East". This volume of 18 essays highlights the key dimensions of Macao's remarkable "One country, Two Systems" actualisation experience in its first 15 years, and discusses how Macao transformed and what challenges it encountered during its post-handover transformation. The volume has several focuses. It first investigates the political and electoral issues in a critical manner─ post-handover Macao suffered from maladministration and limited democratization, and the chief executives selected lacked representativeness due to restricted public participation in the electoral process. Overall speaking, the government lacked legitimacy and popular support. From a socio-economic point of view, this book looks into the business model in running Macao's casinos and the emerging culture of mass participation and youth participation in political affairs. The education reformation and changes in civic identity of local Macao Chinese are also addressed. Finally, the volume looks into how post-handover Macao relates itself in the international politics affair.