Books you must read to understand Vegas

Las Vegas doesn’t get much credit for it, but it really is a literary sort of city.

Think about all the times over the years that Las Vegas has served as fodder for authors, journalists, novelists and anybody else who felt moved to put pen to paper and tell us who we are and how we got here.

In fact, there’s so much Las Vegas lit out there, the real problem is: Where does an inquisitive reader begin?

It’s toward that end — and with all of those holiday gift cards burning holes in local bibliophiles’ pockets — that we’ve put together a list of books that any well-read Southern Nevadan should check out.

We make no claim that this reading list is comprehensive or, for that matter, even correct. We can think of at least a dozen more books that would merit a place on any such compendium, so feel free to tell us about your own.

NONFICTION

Looking at where we’ve been is essential to figuring out where we are and even, maybe, where we’re going. Toward that end, Geoff Schumacher, director of content development for The Mob Museum, counts as a must-read Stanley W. Paher’s “Las Vegas: As It Began, As It Grew.”

Paher is author of several historical volumes about Nevada that explore, for instance, ghost towns and mining camps, and this 1971 volume is an excellent book focused on the early years in Las Vegas, Schumacher says.

Then, to continue your exploration of Las Vegas’ past, Schumacher would recommend “Resort City in the Sunbelt: Las Vegas 1930-2000” by Eugene P. Moehring.

In the book, Moehring, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with several local-themed books under his belt, charts the evolution of Las Vegas from an old frontier town to a modern American city, Schumacher says.

Then, look at the less savory underpinnings of Las Vegas’ evolution in “The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America” by Sally Denton and Roger Morris, first published in 2002.

In the book, Denton and Morris characterize Las Vegas as “a place of intrigue and underworld influence and interesting characters,” Schumacher says, and do a fine job of putting Las Vegas — both its reality and its illusion — “in a national perspective.”

Biographies of the many people who, for good or bad and for motives positive and less-positive, figured in the making of Las Vegas can bring even the sturdiest bookshelf to the point of collapse. For readers with neither enough time to read all of them or the bookshelves strong enough to store them, Michael Green, an associate history professor at UNLV, recommends checking out “The First 100: Portraits of the Men and Women Who Shaped Las Vegas” by A.D. Hopkins and K.J. Evans.

The book began as a series of stories in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and offers a survey of biographies of the long-gone and the still-here. Selection of the 100 people profiled “was very carefully done, and, I think, for the most part correctly done,” Green says, “and the profiles really just open up Las Vegas as to who did what and how this place came to be and how people made it what it is today.”

But Las Vegas is more than a set of map coordinates. It also long has loomed large in pop culture as, maybe, other, more staid, cities’ glitzier cousin. Schumacher recommends “Bright Light City: Las Vegas in Popular Culture” by Larry Gragg.

“(It’s) an excellent look at the world’s perception (of Las Vegas) over time and what Las Vegas did to enhance that or detract from that image.”

Green agrees, saying Gragg’s 2013 book offers “great understanding about how the rest of the world views Las Vegas and how Las Vegas has shaped that point of view.”

Finally, to put it all in regional context, longtime Southern Nevadan and author Sally Denton calls “Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West” by Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb “one of the most insightful studies of Las Vegas as an economic and natural resource center of the rising American West.”

Oh, and because no Las Vegas reading list would be complete without a look at entertainment, Schumacher recommends RJ writer Mike Weatherford’s “Cult Vegas: The Weirdest! The Wildest! The Swingen’est Town on Earth!” which, he says, “really captures the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s in terms of Las Vegas and what was happening in the showrooms and lounges here.”

FICTION

As befits a canvas that can be, at the same time, dark and colorful, deep and superficial, serious and downright goofy, Las Vegas long has been a popular setting for everything from serious fiction to genre novels.

In the category of serious literature, Denton would recommend “The Goldfinch,” winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, in which author Donna Tartt “has depicted a painfully keen Las Vegas, as seen through the eyes of a rootless teenager.”

Also considered by Denton as fiction “stunning” in its portrayal of contemporary Southern Nevada and Las Vegas is “Battleborn,” the debut short story collection by Claire Vaye Watkins.

Watkins was raised in Pahrump, Denton notes, and her “prize-winning depiction of the gritty lives of heroic and tragic figures in her home state has brought national attention to her, and to her world at the edges of Las Vegas.”

Novelist and College of Southern Nevada professor Laura McBride — whose own novel, “We Are Called to Rise,” is another worthy addition to the canon of Las Vegas literature — agrees, noting that she considers herself to be “a very setting-oriented person, not just in literature but in my life. I’m superattuned to what the air feels like and what it smells like and how things sound.”

And, in the stories in “Battleborn,” McBride says, Watkins “really captures that physical desert feeling, and I don’t think you get that often in literature.”

McBride also would include on a Las Vegas reading list “Beautiful Children” by Charles Bock, a novel that, she concedes, “can be a little dark.”

However, she continues, while the story is set in Las Vegas, “it’s not the casino and the Strip. It’s about the people who live here, which is interesting to me.”

McBride’s’ CSN colleague and fellow novelist H. Lee Barnes also writes about Las Vegas and its people in a realistic way. Of Barnes’ books, McBride would put “Cold Deck,” as first on her required reading list.

The novel begins with the 1980 fire at the MGM Grand and, through the use of casino workers as characters, resonates with anybody who lives here, she says, “Because) even if you and I don’t work in the casinos, we know people who do.”

MAGAZINE ARTICLES

Reams of magazine pages have been devoted to Las Vegas over the decades, with everything from so-called men’s magazines to Life and Time making it their mission to tell people what is, what might be or what certainly isn’t (but makes for a good story anyway) going on here.

From that body of literature, two pieces stand out as worth a read, even if they are now outdated. First, there’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” a sort-of profile of Frank Sinatra by Gay Talese that ran in Esquire in April 1966 and which, on the magazine’s 70th anniversary, was deemed by its editors to be the best story the magazine ever published.

Only part of the story takes place in Las Vegas, where Sinatra escapes to catch a fight and for a bit of R&R while preparing for a network TV special. But the piece offers an intriguing look at the man who — thanks to Rat Pack nostalgia and “Oceans 11” — ruled over Las Vegas entertainment for years.

Then there’s Tom Wolfe, whose essay, “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!” is a prime example of the New Journalism of the ’60s and ’70s. The essay ran in Esquire in 1964 and also appears in the 1965 Wolfe collection “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.”

Today, it’s considered sort of an iconic article, says Schumacher, and really the precursor to the Hunter Thompson book.

AND A FEW MORE …

Of course, the Hunter S. Thompson book to which Schumacher refers is 1971’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” and for readers of a certain age, it’s probably the first book that comes to mind when the words “Las Vegas” are uttered.

However, because it’s not quite fiction and not quite nonfiction — but, rather, an example of a style Thompson called “gonzo journalism” — its value on a Las Vegas must-read list is debated, even if it’s probably still worth reading as a reflection of its time.

“I’ve never read it all the way through,” says Mark Hall-Patton, Clark County museums administrator. “It’s Hunter S. Thompson at his best, but it’s not so much a history of this area. It’s just this bizarre, drug-addled view of what we were then.”

Similarly, “The Green Felt Jungle,” a 1963 expose by Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris, also might be worth a read today because of what it brought to the table when it was published.

The book “helped to sort of rip off the facade” of Las Vegas, Schumacher says. “It takes the PR out of the story of Las Vegas and kind of reveals the sort of dirty underwear of Las Vegas.

“It wasn’t the first book to do that, by the way,” he adds. “In 1958 there was a book called ‘The Great Las Vegas Fraud.’ It was an indictment of Las Vegas and kind of a precursor to ‘The Green Felt Jungle.’ ”

Still, Hall-Patton says many people were upset when “The Green Felt Jungle” came out.

“It’s just a wonderful picture of what was going on at that time, and well-written,” Hall-Patton says. “It’s kind of a fun read as well.”

And because nobody ever said that required reading lists can’t be fun, Hall-Patton offers a substantively meager but fun look at a specific time in Las Vegas’ history, via the novel that birthed the classic 1972 TV movie “The Night Stalker.”

The movie, about a vampire serial killer in Las Vegas, was based on a previously unpublished novel by Jeff Rice, a reporter for the Las Vegas Sun, and the TV film did so well that a sequel and a short-lived series followed.

Hall-Patton says the book is “just part of the mass market fiction collection we have out here,” and that it’s, not surprisingly, a fun read.

Even more importantly, local readers will appreciate that “it gets so much right” about Las Vegas, Hall-Patton says, including eschewing that make-a-left-turn-on-Fremont-and-end-up-at-Caesars Palace thing found so often in cheapie books and films set here.

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.