Las Vegas the Grand: The Strip, the Casinos, the Mob, the Stars

By: Mike Carpenter

Narrated by: Randal Schaffer

Las Vegas really is unique in so many ways. One of them is that its history, which is short but intense, can be told through the birth and demise of the resorts that dot the Strip, the rise and fall of its casino industry titans. This brief history of the Las Vegas Strip presents every casino hotel built along Las Vegas Boulevard South, the most celebrated and most visited stretch of asphalt on Earth, starting in 1941 with the El Rancho Vegas. The names of the key players in the triumph of this oasis of fun in the middle of nowhere, the dreamers who made a town that's the stuff of dreams, are Jay Sarno, Howard Hughes, Kirk Kerkorian, Bill Bennett, Steve Wynn, Sheldon Adelson. They are the main characters of this story.

Revised and updated in February 2021.

©2017 Mike Carpenter (P)2021 Mike Carpenter

I'd return it if I could

On the plus side, this book does give some interesting background and is useful as a quick, although not entirely accurate, summary of the evolution of the Strip. I did learn a few things about the earlier days, but now I question whether that is accurate or not since there are other aspects I know more about which the author gets wrong. There are also some curious omissions that I feel someone familiar with Las Vegas would have included.

I'm not quite sure what the author's intent was for this book. Whenever mentioning dollar amounts (which happens a lot) it is quickly followed by the equivalent amount in dollar value for the year 2017 (when the book was written). I got pretty good at estimating that 2017 dollar amount. This constant comparison breaks the flow of the narrative and isn't really useful as I listen to it in 2023. He often says 'refer to chapter' x when talking about people or places in later chapters that he thinks you might have forgotten about. Maybe he wanted it to be a textbook or more legitimate reference book?

The recording quality is inconsistent. There are obvious punch in phrases that have a recording quality that is different enough from the original edit to be jarring. It is understandable that recording updates years after the original won't match exactly, but it sounds like the editors didn't try to make them flow smoothly. I'm not sure that any of those edits added enough value to make them worth the inconsistent recording.

Some of the updates from 2021 are already out of date, too, which is a common hazard of writing about recent or current Las Vegas.