Thursday, January 29, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: LV revisited

By Geoff Schumacher

After many years when you could count the important ones on one hand, history books about Las Vegas are coming fast and furious. Everybody seems to have one either in the bookstore or in the pipeline (including the writer of this review). Several will be published in the months leading up to next spring's centennial celebration.

The latest off the presses is Las Vegas: The Fabulous First Century, by local writer Thomas "Taj" Ainlay Jr. and researcher Judy Dixon Gabaldon. It falls squarely into the category of "popular overview," a niche it shares with A Short History of Las Vegas, by Barbara and Myrick Land, and Las Vegas: The Great American Playground, by Robert D. McCracken.

Ainlay and Gabaldon cover all the basics, from the first white adventurers to set foot in the Las Vegas Valley to the Mormon settlers to the railroad townsite to Hoover Dam to World War II to nuclear bomb testing. They discuss Bugsy Siegel and Benny Binion and Jay Sarno and Howard Hughes. Along the way they survey the city's entertainment history, from Liberace to Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to Siegfried and Roy. And in a refreshing touch, the authors give considerable ink to the city's ethnic and racial minorities, including Paiutes, Asians, African-Americans and Latinos. Also, the book seems generally accurate and carefully edited.

What Ainlay and Gabaldon don't do is break new ground. They have done little if any original research. They basically scoured all the readily available published materials about Las Vegas--academic texts, oral histories, etc.--and summarized them in succinct, breezy prose. They succeed in accomplishing this modest goal, but they don't try to reach beyond it. Even most of the pictures included in the book are well-traveled.

In other words, if you don't know squat about Las Vegas' colorful history, this book would be a good starting point (though not necessarily better than the Land or McCracken books). But if you already are familiar with the basic outline, this book isn't going to be of much interest. Serious history buffs will be more satisfied and challenged by Eugene Moehring's Resort City in the Sunbelt, Sally Denton and Roger Morris' The Money and the Power or Hal Rothman's Neon Metropolis.

Perhaps Las Vegas: The Fabulous First Century will be the last book of its kind for a while. As the years pass and the city grows, its history becomes deeper and more multifaceted, rendering a popular overview increasingly difficult to pull off in 160 pages.