The Grit Beneath the Glitter is the first real look at the new Las Vegas from the inside. In it, long-time residents as well as professionals reflect on the transformation of one of the fastest-growing and most famous cities on earth, yet one about which relatively little is known. They offer a lively and compelling portrait of the other side of Las Vegas: the people and institutions that support the glitter of the gaming and entertainment industry. Examining a range of topics–from the city’s commercial history, labor conditions, and environmental problems to an analysis of the famous lights of the Strip–the contributors uncover the contradictions between the illusion and the reality of the city, the seam between fantasy and the life it masks. The essays in this collection explore the world that employees experience when they enter gaming palaces from an employee entrance in a back parking lot rather than through the scripted doors of casino/hotel palaces. They take readers into the neighborhoods where 1.4 million Americans now live, attend school, eat dinner, and go to work.
Inhoudsopgave
Introduction: The Many Faces of Las Vegas
Hal Rothman and Mike Davis
Part I: Image and Reality
Scripting Las Vegas: Noir Naïfs, Junking Up, and the New Strip
Norman M. Klein
Las Vegas of the Mind: Shooting Movies in and about Nevada
Francisco Menendez
Discordant Infrastructure
Peter Goin
Part II: Nuts and Bolts
Growth, Services, and the Political Economy of Gambling in Las Vegas, 1970–2000
Eugene Moehring
Lighting Las Vegas: Electricity and the City of Glitz
Jay Brigham
Build It and the Water Will Come
Jon Christensen
The Social Costs of Rapid Urbanization in Southern Nevada
Robert E. Parker
Rise to Power: The Recent History of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas
Courtney Alexander
Class Struggle in Oz
Mike Davis
Part III: Voices
‘Squeezing the Juice Out of Las Vegas’: Reflections On Growing Up in Smalltown, USA
Brian Frehner
I Didn’t Know Anybody Lived There
Shannon Mc Mackin
How I Became a Native
William N. Thompson
Inside the Glitter: Lives of Casino Workers
Kit Miller
Part IV: Shaping Life
‘She Works Hard for Her Money’: A Reassessment of Las Vegas Women Workers, 1945–1985
Joanne L. Goodwin
The Racial Cauldron
Mike Davis
Inside Jean
Constance Devereaux
Looking into a Dry Lake: Uncovering the Women’s View of Las Vegas 000
Amie Williams
Part V: From Pariah to Paradigm
Colony, Capital, and Casino: Money in the Real Las Vegas
Hal Rothman
Who Puts the ‘Sin’ in ‘Sin City’ Stories? Girls of Grit and Glitter in the City of Women
Kathryn Hausbeck
Nevada Goes Global: The Foreign Gaming Rule and the Spread of Casinos
William N. Thompson
Canto: Las Vegas
Richard Misrach
Contributors
Index
Over de auteur
Hal Rothman is Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Among his books are Devil’s Bargains (1998), The Greening of a Nation? (1998), and Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the 21st Century (due out in 2002). Mike Davis is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is the author of City of Quartz (1992) and Ecology of Fear (1998), among other books.
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