Books: Loving Las Vegas

By Geoff Schumacher

The promotional material for The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas claims that Marc Cooper's new book follows "in the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson." Nothing could be further from the truth. Cooper's exploration of Las Vegas casino culture does not involve ingesting massive amounts of drugs or any resulting hallucinations, and Cooper only occasionally imbibes modest quantities of alcohol. What's more, as a mild-mannered sort, Cooper does not make a scene anywhere in Las Vegas that gets him thrown out of a casino or that requires a close encounter with jack-booted police.

That said, Cooper, a contributing editor for The Nation magazine and a columnist for L.A. Weekly, delivers a spirited and well-written overview of the "new Las Vegas," a place he loves despite its many flaws. Cooper deserves praise for being one of the few outsiders to write about Las Vegas with knowledge and insight.

As informative and entertaining as The Last Honest Place in America can be, I found myself asking a nagging question: Why was this book written and published? Cooper is a veteran progressive journalist, known for hardnosed reporting and biting political commentary. He's traveled to war zones and political battle sites, returning with poignant stories of struggle, tragedy and hard-won triumph. And the publisher is Nation Books, affiliated with the muckraking bible of the Left. Considering these facts, it might have naturally followed for Cooper to write a damning critique of Las Vegas as representing everything that is wrong with unfettered capitalism, or some such.

But no. Cooper, it turns out, is an avid blackjack player who has been visiting Las Vegas for years. His frequent sojourns across the Mojave turned into a jaunty Village Voice cover story back in 1993, during which he and a colorful sidekick (a Hunter Thompson homage) gambled ferociously while finding a little time to check the pulse of the post-Mirage city. Cooper, alas, loves Vegas, celebrating its honest embrace of vice and greed rather than condemning it.

Ostensibly, the book's raison d'etre is to explain the popularity of Las Vegas, especially its persistent allure after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when pundits proclaimed that fun was dead. "Las Vegas, after all, was now supposed to be everything we Americans were putting aside in this new chapter of history thrust so suddenly and rudely upon us," Cooper writes. "We were, after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, said the media, less frivolous, more serious, less ironic, more authentic. How would Las Vegas, with all its bombast and artifice, fit into this post-9/11 America?"

Quite nicely, of course. Las Vegas took a significant hit in the weeks after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., as tourists feared to fly. But the city soon bounced back to former levels of visitor volume and gambling activity. Cooper addresses this phenomenon, but his curiosity about Las Vegas soon wanders. He laments the demolition of the Desert Inn Hotel, traces the city's early history, explores public corruption in the strip club industry and dutifully records Mayor Oscar Goodman's sound bites. He also describes his gambling escapades, and tries gamely to explain why losing your money in a casino is thrilling.

Further afield, Cooper spends time at a dealer school, explains high-tech trends in slot machines and bumps up against the harsh reality of his own gambling fever: the shattered lives of people addicted to video crack. Cooper ventures downtown, where he relishes the old-school atmosphere of Binion's Horseshoe and recounts the legends of its founding namesake, Benny Binion. "If Vegas is the major leagues of gambling, then Binion's is its Fenway Park," Cooper cleverly observes, regretting later in the book to report the casino's financial crisis and sudden closure. And getting completely away from his thesis, Cooper outlines the city's homeless crisis, takes a spin out to Summerlin (a "Poltergeist in Paradise") and briefly discusses the state's underfunding of social and government services. Interestingly, Cooper avoids two hot Las Vegas topics that would seem to fit well with his and The Nation's progressive interests: the rise of the powerful Culinary Union and the Latino immigrant explosion.

The Last Honest Place in America is all over the place, like an anxious fly zipping here and there and never landing anyplace for long. That's a weakness of the book, but it also makes for a breezy read that rarely gets bogged down in minutiae. Cooper, whose excellent prose is marred by horrendous proofreading, has added another brick to the rising wall of books about Las Vegas. Why, perhaps, can only be answered thus: because it's there. Now that it's out of his system, Cooper can get back to the important business of hammering the president, exposing injustice and championing progressive causes.