I replied that it isn’t quite that clear-cut, and that you’re not talking about a monolithic entity. Talking about “the mob” owning a casino the way a corporation might is nonsense–instead, you’ve got individual investors with varying levels of connection to other illegal enterprises who have different levels of involvement with casino operations. I told Mr. Earley as much, and sent him a link to this review (on an earlier site).

I got back a very wounded reply, thanking me for my time, with the final remark, “I hope the next person to write about this does a better job.”

As you can tell from my preface, I really don’t like pointing out flaws in other people’s work. Most of the time, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But parts of this book struck me as deliberately dumbed-down (the academic in me wants to say “reductionist”), which offends me. As someone who’s based his career on studying the histories of gambling and Las Vegas, it bugs me when people who should know better divide history into two discrete periods–”when the mob ran Vegas” and “the corporations.” The truth is much more nuanced, and I think anyone who’s going to be seriously approaching the topic owes it to their readers to do some homework and try to show the casino world as it really is, not as it appears on television.

That being said, Earley’s probably sold many more books than me, so maybe his approach is better.

I’d still like to write a comprehensive history of casinos in Las Vegas. I really see Suburban Xanadu as the start of my exploration of the area (as it quite literally was) and I definitely want to do some more research in the area. I’d like to write a book that both tells the story of the different casinos and their owners and answers the questions: how did Vegas get so popular? why did Vegas get so popular? and what does that mean for 20th/21st century America?

Finally, thanks for reading and enjoying Suburban Xanadu.