Bright Light City: Las Vegas in Popular Culture

With its stories of mobsters, gambling, and showgirls, Las Vegas looms large in American culture. Here, Gragg (John F. Kennedy: A Biography), a history professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, tackles a potentially fascinating question: what draws Americans to Las Vegas and what makes the city so alluring. Each chapter focuses on different thematic portrayals of Las Vegas in journalistic accounts and film, television, and novels: gambling, luxury, entertainment, portrayals of women, and organized crime. Unfortunately, what follows are endless strings of quotes and examples that obscure any analysis Gragg has to offer. His pedestrian prose does little to convey a sense of the manic energy that one has come to expect from Las Vegas. Devotees of the city will no doubt delight in the book’s wealth of details, but overall, the work feels more like a compendium of images than a cohesive argument of scholarly value. Gragg is clearly enamored of his subject, but his book might have been better served by more penetrating questioning and historical context. He ultimately comes to the somewhat obvious conclusion that Las Vegas offers affordable escape—both from the humdrum and from the constraints of “proper” society. (Apr.)