I have been writing about casino history for a long time—my entire professional career. In recent years, my pace has slowed down a bit as I have been focusing on my ombuds work, which is why I haven’t published anything since my last book, At the Sands.
That is going to change in January, when my new book, Something for Your Money: A History of Las Vegas Casinos, is published.
Every book I have written has a why. Suburban Xanadu, my first, grew from my doctoral dissertation, which was my attempt to understand why casino resorts seemed to work so well, indirectly answering a question I had as a kid in Atlantic City, which was, “Why are they building casinos here?” Even though it is explicitly about Las Vegas, and the Strip in particular, I really wrote it to better understand Atlantic City.
Cutting the Wire came about because I was curious about how the Wire Act, which was created to combat organized crime in the 1960s by targeting sports betting over telephones, was being used to prosecute online gambling providers. After Suburban Xanadu, it might be my most academic book.
Roll the Bones happened because I got an offer too good to refuse (in the good way) from a publisher: to write a single-volume history of gambling for a popular, as opposed to academic, audience. That project pushed me out of my comfort zone (United States history), forcing me to engage with gambling history from around the globe. After the original published let the book go out of print, I recovered the rights, and put out the Casino Edition, which focused more tightly on the history of casinos, with some of the material on racing and lotteries removed.
Roll the Bones: Casino Edition was the first book that I published myself, which gave me the confidence to roll the dice myself on a book that I couldn’t seem to get a publisher interested in, Grandissimo. The why of both editions of Roll the Bones was clear: tell the general reading public as much about the history of gambling in a single book. Unlike Suburban Xanadu or Cutting the Wire, I wasn’t seeking to answer any major questions, but rather to just learn and explain as much of gambling history as I could.
Grandissimo came into my head quickly. I remember thinking that, after the sprawling millennia of Roll the Bones, I wanted to write something with a clear beginning, middle, and end. And I wanted to write a biography. Who, I wondered, was the most influential casino builder not to already have a book about them? Jay Sarno’s name immediately popped up. He built Caesars Palace and Circus Circus and, even outside of the casino stuff, had a very interesting life.
My previous books had taken about a year to write from idea to final draft, though getting them through the publication process took much longer. Grandissimo took much longer—about six years from idea to publication. I had a chance to do many original interviews and to find new archival sources. Reflecting on it, this was the most fun book that I have written yet, in that I had the most fun writing it.
I then took a step back to my roots with Boardwalk Playground. Pulled together mostly from articles I had written for Casino Connection magazine about various aspects of Atlantic City history, it also incorporated new research on several famous hotels and personalities. I wrote this to better understand where I had come from, and it is my most personal book by far. It’s also my worst selling by far, so while the question that drove me was, “What should people know about the history of Atlantic City,” the answer was, “apparently they don’t want to learn much.”
After that one, I returned to Las Vegas with two books compiled from focused oral history projects that I conducted. While I am “just’ the editor and not the author, they both were driven by deep questions: what does it mean to work in table games management, and how has that work changed over the past 50 years (Tales from the Pit), and what does it mean to work in slot management, and how has it changed in the past 50 years (Tales from the Slot Floor). Those books were about letting others speak in their own voice with as little interpretation as possible from me, which makes them quite different from my other works, and which explains why I am not the author.
At the Sands was an attempt to explain why the Sands still has a special place among all the other classic Las Vegas casinos, even though it has been gone for decades. Yes, the Rat Pack had a lot to do with it, but I wanted to consciously write about the property both before and after Frank, Dean, and Sammy performed at the Copa. And there is definitely something special about the Sands, since this has become my best-selling book.
I’ve left out the academic books I have edited, which leads me to Something for Your Money. I wrote this book because I kept hearing that people wanted a history of Las Vegas casinos in a single volume—something that covered all the major properties and historical developments without branching off into other jurisdictions. Not seeing anything out there, I figured that I was the best person to give it a shot.
I had a bit of a head start. For about seven years, I wrote detailed feature pieces for Vegas Seven magazine about the history of individual casinos. That became the core of the book, but I also did substantial new research on several properties, and wrote brief introductions to each era covered in the book that sum up the major changes across the city.
You could say that Something for Your Money is my way of summing up everything I have been writing about Las Vegas for the past 25 years. It starts with the founding of Las Vegas and ends with the closings of the Tropicana and Mirage.
I will also say that this is probably the last book about casino history I am going to write, at least for the foreseeable future. I feel that I have answered most of the questions I have had about casinos, and while I still have a lot of passion for that history, and love connecting with people about it, I have a few things planned for 2025 that are going to be taking me in a different direction.
If I have sufficiently piqued your curiosity, you don’t have to wait long: Something for Your Money will be released in January 2025, and I am not going to be shy about getting the word out.
So until next time, expect the unexpected, stay informed, and I’ll stay informal.
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