Review of Las Vegas: A Pictorial Celebration

Title:

Las Vegas: A Pictorial Celebration

Author:

Michael S. Green and Elan Penn

Publisher:

Sterling Publishing

Date:

2005

ISBN:

1-4027-2385-7

Pages:

160

Price:

$14.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@jetcafe.org

June 12, 2011

As a city, Las Vegas presents wonderful photographic opportunities. Moreover, the scenery within a few hours travel of the city by car is as spectacular as any place in the world. In Las Vegas: A Pictorial History Michael Green describes the history of this part of the world while Elan Penn fills the book with photographs that make this history come alive.

Green teaches history at the College of Southern Nevada, so he's more than qualified to write the story of the region. He starts with about 20 pages of overview, and then divides his narrative into eight sections. First up is a prehistoric description of the area starting with the geology and then moving forward in time to cover the indigenous peoples who called southern Nevada home and continuing through the arrival of European settlers. The second section covers the history of downtown, Hoover Dam, Boulder City, and the Nevada Test Site.

The bulk of the history is devoted to the lavish resorts that serve as the main attraction for the area. The first of these that batch Green covers are the old school casinos on the Strip. This is followed by histories, such as they are, of the newer Strip casinos, near-Strip attractions, downtown properties, off Strip sites and neighborhoods of interest, and, finally, some of the attractions and communities found in the broader region.

The histories are brief. There aren't that many pages in Las Vegas: A Pictorial Celebration and most of the real estate is taken up by photographs. However, some of the material was new to me, and I'm pretty broadly read when it comes to Las Vegas casino histories. I think I spotted a few errors, or at least inconsistencies with the established orthodoxy, but nothing major.

In the early part of the book most of the photographs are likely to be familiar to those who have read other Las Vegas histories or pictorials. There aren't that many good images of the early days of the community, so there's a limited archive from which the authors could draw. Still some of the pictures selected were new to me, and that's always welcome.

The photographs in the rest of the book are large and in full color, reproduced with all the technical skill you would expect from a volume such as this. The images are vivid and on point. These are the same sort of shots I'd expect the casinos or the visitors authority would put on brochures and such. An awful lot of the shots are from familiar angles, and while the photos are effective, to me they are far more functional than they are artistic or inspiring.

The book works as a casino history, but there are other books that provide overlapping information with more detail and do so in the context of a better constructed narrative. The photos are nice, but there are other pictorials that I believe do a better job of capturing the soul and history of the city. Jack Sheehan's The Players is a fine example of the former, and Su Kim Chung's Las Vegas Then and Now is an example of the latter. Still, as a combination history/pictorial/coffee table book, Las Vegas: A Pictorial Celebration fills that niche nicely.

Capsule:

Las Vegas: A Pictorial History is a combination of a history and photo catalogue of Las Vegas and some of the surrounding region in a format suitable for the coffee table. While I believe individual books focusing on the history or photography of Las Vegas provide a superior product individually, Las Vegas: A Pictorial History does a respectable job of combining these products into one volume.