The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas [Hardcover]

Marc Cooper (Author)

Book Description

Series: Nation Books | Publication Date: May 10, 2004

Las Vegas America begins with the dynamiting of the Desert Inn in October 2001, the moment when old Vegas “cool” died and the new corporate model claimed definitive victory. From this moment, Cooper takes us on a journey from the top of the Luxor Hotel’s glass pyramid, down “the Strip,” past the golden glow of the Mirage into the town’s black ghetto. Along the way, the best-selling author introduces us to a cast of characters including casino king Steve Wynn and Tim Thuller, leader of the Vagabound Motorcycle Club. He explores life among Vegas’s 75,000 union families and considers how outlaws and iconoclasts are adapting to life in the new corporate city. Finally Cooper strays beyond the Strip into a desolate landscape characterized by pawnshops, destitution, crime, and impending environmental crisis. “For me,” writes Cooper, “Las Vegas is the last, most honest place in America. Vegas is often described as a city of dreams and fantasy, of tinselish make-believe. But this is getting backwards. Vegas is the American market ethic stripped completely bare, a mini-world totally free of the pretenses and protocols of modern consumer capitalism. Watching it operate with barely any mediation generates nothing short of an intellectual frisson.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As Britney Spears recently discovered, Las Vegas has a curiously powerful hold on people. And it has taken hold of Cooper, too; his book practically teems with his own fascination with Sin City. It started when he was a kid, when his parents took him along on their gambling jaunts, and it's that enthrallment that Cooper seeks to explore and explain here. And he does it immediately postâ€"September 11, which is on one hand crass, but on the other appropriate: is there a place for such unabashed superficiality in a more fearful and serious world? The answer, Cooper finds, is yes. Vegas has become a fixture of the American landscape, its "symbolic capital" in many ways. Indeed, Vegas presents a special allure to cultural theorists like Neil Postman, to whom this volume is dedicated. The city embraces its kitschy supremacy with its drive-thru chapels and casinos. But it's also undergoing an evolution, about which Cooper is somewhat wistful, away from its early, campy seediness and toward a more fully realized, corporate-run money machine. The book's pace has the feel of travelling along the Vegas strip, with dazzling, glorious details whizzing past that readers don't have much time to ponder. Cooper, a Nation contributing editor, writes well and has an eye for bizarre situations. But by book's end, much like after a Vegas weekend, readers may feel somewhat empty. They've seen a lot of bright, shiny things that don't have much substance, and while overwhelmed by the imagery they may not be quite sure what the point was.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Cooper, the veteran journalist (and radio-show host), begins with the destruction of the last vestige of the old Las Vegas: the Desert Inn, where the Rat Pack frolicked, demolished in 2001. Now the hotels are operated by corporations, not mobsters; the casinos are as much about entertainment as gambling; and the town is decidedly family friendly. But, as Cooper discovered, some things about the city never change. The casinos are still their own little worlds, cut off from the outside and designed to make the gambler forget that anything exists other than the table at which he is sitting. What makes this profile of Las Vegas fascinating is the way it works on two levels. As Cooper goes about showing us the remade city, he also falls prey to the allure of the old Vegas, the writer sinking so deeply into his story that he becomes a part of it, just another gambler pulled into the seductive world of the city that never sleeps. New Journalism meets the New Vegas. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books (May 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560254904
• ISBN-13: 978-1560254904
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,394,524 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #93 in Books > Travel > United States > States > Nevada

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars From Mobsters to Teamsters, May 18, 2004

By 

takingadayoff "takingadayoff" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas (Hardcover)

The Last Honest Place in America covers a lot of the same ground that other books about Las Vegas have done in the past several years. Author Marc Cooper interviews a cross-section of Las Vegas types (stripper, blackjack dealer, casino owner, homeless advocate), reminisces about the old Las Vegas of the Mob, discusses some of the recent local scandals (the Binion murder, the political fight over lapdancing regulations that local columnists dubbed "G-Sting"), and profiles celebrity Mayor Oscar Goodman.

If you haven't already read Hal Rothman's The Grit Beneath the Glitter and Pete Early's Super Casino, then The Last Honest Place in America is a fun introduction to the behind-the-scenes Las Vegas.

However, there is something about Cooper's book that does stand out, and that is his interview with stripper Andrea Lee Hackett. Not only is Hackett a bit older than the other strippers at 49, but she is a full-time labor organizer as well. Although Vegas strippers aren't unionized (yet), Hackett works with the ACLU and labor organizations to protect her colleagues' rights. She is extremely articulate on labor issues and admits to being a Socialist and a former machinist at Boeing. Oh, and she used to be a man.

It probably won't be long before someone does an in-depth study of unionism in Las Vegas. It is one of the few places in America where, because of unionism (and I am by no means an uncritical fan of unions), a hotel maid or a valet or dishwasher can make a decent living. This phenomenon is worth a book by itelf, and The Last Honest Place in America is worth reading if only for Andrea Lee Hackett's story.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Vegas Read, August 10, 2005

By 

The JuRK (Our Vast, Cultural Desert) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas (Nation Books) (Paperback)

I picked this book up at the Mandalay Bay's Reading Room bookstore during my last visit to Vegas but read it after I got home. How can anyone take time to read a book in Vegas?

Marc Cooper's writing keeps moving for a quick overview of Vegas history, focusing on the couple of years after 9/11. For a book crammed with a lot of info and trivia, I didn't find any chapter where it slowed down or lagged.

Cooper writes about his own experience as a Vegas gambler (where most visitors and tourists exist), and chats with a transsexual stripper trying to unionize nude dancers, Blackjack dealers and other older Vegas denizens who reminisce about the Sin City they used to know. He also profiles the "Big O," Oscar Goodman, who first made his mark as a mob lawyer and now acts as the mayor of Las Vegas.

Cooper then moves on to listen to professionals working with addicted gamblers and an activist-monk fighting for the homeless, showing an underside to the party.

(I think the book would've been more interesting if Cooper had used his investigative skills to take a closer peek at the ultra-rich in Vegas, juxtaposing that with the chapters about the bottom-dwelling addicts and homeless. At the same time I was reading this book, I also read the latest Vanity Fair article by upper-crust gadfly, Dominick Dunne, detailing a lavish visit to the opening of the new Wynn Hotel & Casino. It would've fit nicely into Cooper's book, broadening it from the richest to the poorest in Vegas).

There are several complaints about Cooper turning political near the end of the book. There are snide comments about the War in Iraq and the Bush Administration, but the book doesn't turn into a complete political screed.
The venom Cooper reserves for an abstinence group meeting near Vegas does interfere with the flow, however. He talks about strippers, gambling addicts, crazy homeless, mobsters and even mob attorneys while remaining objective and indifferent to any of their messy details--but he completely tears into virgins participating in an abstinence program. It just about ruins the book.

(Also, there are no less than six typos in the epilogue alone in the paperback I read).

But this is still a good Vegas read.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A gambler writes about life on (and behind) The Strip, May 10, 2005

By 

saskatoonguy (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas (Hardcover)

Marc Cooper's book is a collection of essays about Las Vegas. The first quarter of the book is a history of the city, which will be old material unless this is the first book you've read on the subject. Why does everyone who writes about Las Vegas feel obligated to rehash the city's history? The rest of the book is an assortment of essays about such things as the Ted Binion murder trial, a Franciscan monk who works with the homeless, corruption in local politics, the life story of the author's favorite blackjack dealer, a self-help group for gambling addicts, and a transsexual stripper who is trying to unionize the city's strippers. Cooper loves to gamble and conveys the addictive nature of trying to win at blackjack. What surprised me most is that for only $250 you can take a 100 hour course on how to be a blackjack dealer - surely a bargain for training that actually leads to a job.

I can't help but compare this book to Hal Rothman's "Neon Metropolis," which covers the same territory. Rothman's book covers a wider variety of topics and focuses more on life away from The Strip than Cooper does. On the other hand, Cooper doesn't seem to have an ideological axe to grind like Rothman, although both writers are politically liberal. Cooper's theme, that Las Vegas is an "honest" place at a time when Americans have lost faith in other institutions, seems like quite a stretch.

Cooper's book feels like it was published too hastily: There's an epilogue with updates on his stories - why not simply revise the main part of the book instead? There are a few factual errors, there's no index, and someone should tell Cooper that the possessive form of "it" is not "it's."