Nevada Books

This review is really a review of all of Robert Cameron's books of aerial photography. He has many, including books of New York City, San Diego, L.A., Chicago, etc., and every one is packed with huge, colorful, full-page aerial photos. Cameron also knows a lot about the history of the cities he photographs, writing insightful captions, and many times including old aerial photos for side-by-side comparisons.

Cameron doesn't just shoot random shots - he focuses in on landmarks, buildings, neighborhoods, parks, events, etc. The shots are so clear that, if you've been to the city, you'll be able to pick out details you remember, like a park bench you sat on or a statue you admired.

As far as the Las Vegas book goes, well, this city changes so much that now, in 2004, some of the photos are a little out of date. For example, the Bellagio was not even dreamed up yet, and the New York New York is shown under construction. Still, the wide variety of shots, from the Strip and Downtown to the sprawling suburbs to the Hoover Dam, canyons and deserts from the California line to the Arizona line, make this book exceptional. You can spend quite some time just taking in the details on a single page.

This was Camerons last original photo essay and it is a nice creshendo. Vegas is not the most beautiful place Cameron has photographed, I mean in all fairness who can compete with Carmel, Yosemite, and San Francisco, but he makes Vegas sparkle with his fantastic eye. Vegas is a city that photographs well, the desert colors really respond to the camera, one can't help but be amazed at all the construction and I'm from Houston! As a man from the west, it was fiting that Vegas should be Cameron's last hurrah, I mean if this city does not symbolize todays Sunbelt I don't know what does. I may have not chosen this city to be his last, but that does not dampen my appreciation of his talent and the beauty of his photography. I highly recommend this book as I do all of his wonderful photo essays.

I've always been a fan of photography from the air and have taken many myself. Robert Cameron has shown the beautiful city of Las Vegas in a way that most other books on Vegas (and there's a lot)lack.

The photos are crystal clear and have captions that explain the photo. Probably the most intriging of the photos are the ones of the Hotel and Casinos. The Luxor, MGM Grand, and the Stratosphere are all excellently photoed.

A great soverniger for anybody wanting to go or have been to Vegas.

One hell of a book. Great descriptions of hikes in around the vegas area. As well as a few extra bonuses with Death Valley and what not. Even has some Mojave action in there. Well This is a definate must if headin to the Vegas region and need a little something more than the usual Vegas experience.

I have a long shelf full of southwest guidebooks. For the Las Vegas area, Beffort's book is the best choice for people unfamiliar with the desert. It has a good mix of easy and difficult hikes.

My sister and her husband recently visited Vegas while I was out of town. He was at a convention; she wanted to see something other than casinos. I turned her loose with a few suggestions and Beffort's book. She did three of the trips in the Spring Mountains and didn't get lost, uncharacteristic for her. The credit goes to good directions in the book.

This is definitely the best guide available for hiking in the southern Nevada region. This book includes a wide variety of hikes with great descriptions of the areas and how to get to them. It has ideas for hikes of various lengths and difficulties and as well as information on conservation and safety. It includes great maps and photos and lists areas not found in most other guides. If you want to explore areas within a 3 hour drive of Las Vegas, this is the most comprehensive book I have found. I highly recommend it!

Mike White has borrowed the very successful book format pioneered by Jerry Schad to produce 'Afoot & Afield Reno-Tahoe.' Like the original books in the Afoot & Afield series, this volume aims to provide a comprehensive listing of all the day hikes over a broad region within California and Nevada. The result is 175 hikes centered around Lake Tahoe but including the northernmost parts of the Sierra near Graeagle and extending south of Carson Pass. The hikes also vary tremendously in length, ranging from 1/2 mile nature walks to 18 mile all day treks along the Tahoe Rim Trail. All of the classic hikes in the region are described, including the climb to the summits of Mt. Tallac and Mt. Rose, the Tahoe Meadows trail, and beautiful Showers Lake. Literally everyone will be able to find something to suit their tastes in this book, but readers should be warned that White does tend to favor longer and more strenuous hikes. The average hike in this guide is about 7 miles long and includes some serious elevation gain. Nonetheless, White often offers shorter options for his routes so more casual day hikers like my wife and myself will still be able to make use of this guide.

Like other books in the 'Afoot and Afield' series by Wilderness Press, this volume includes a nice chapter on the local and natural history of the region. Route descriptions also feature occasional sidebars to highlight areas of local historical interest. Most important, this book includes excellent maps and retains two features that made Jerry Schad's original books in the series so successful. The first is that the broader region is subdivided into smaller areas so that readers can find hikes that are close to their campgrounds, condos, or casinos as the case may be. Second, each description begins with a capsule summary that quickly gives you details about distance, elevation gain, approximate hiking time, and difficulty for each trail. This is invaluable for tourists who have only a few days to spend in the area.

My last visit to Tahoe was primarily for the purpose of backpacking the Tahoe Rim Trail. I never finished the last 60 miles and have intended to return ever since. This book has further whetted my appetite. The Reno-Tahoe area is one of the most spectacular hiking regions in California and Mike White's volume is a fine addition to the books on the area. If you are planning a visit to the area, this book will be an excellent resource.

We purchased this book for a vacation in Lake Tahoe, and it provided a wonderfully complete summary of the hikes, organized by region. The summaries at the beginning of each hike give you the mileage, terrain, and difficulty rating and were extremely helpful in selecting hikes for each day. The maps are better than many other hiking guides I've seen, because they show all nearby trails in relation to each other, not jut each individual trail. we purchased a US Forest Service map, which was nice to have, but we could have gotten by just with the maps in the book.

Informatively written by Reno local Mike White, Afoot & Afield Reno-Tahoe: A Comprehensive Hiking Guide is a satisfyingly in-depth outdoor hiking guide to the Reno-Tahoe region on the Nevada-California border. Intended for both visitors and residents, Afoot & Afield Reno-Tahoe covers general safety and practical guidelines for hikers plus in-depth examinations of more than 175 mountain hiking and mountain biking trips in the region. Routes vary in length from less than a mile to an 18-mile point-to-point challenge. Black-and-white photographs illustrate this top-quality guide for hikers of all skill and experience levels looking forward to enjoying the Reno-Tahoe wilderness.

This is a winner for several types of readers. If your interested in cemeteries or gravestones you get great pictures of many different types of both. For history buffs, the accompanying background stories of the towns and individuals are fascinating. And for photographs, most are excellent. There are no directions for getting to the cemeteries for reasons the author gives, but with the name of the town (or closest town) a really interested searcher should have enough info. This is a favorite.

I am from Nevada, and this is the best book on life in the old mining days of the state. Being a native of Nevada, i heard alot of stories by the old timers of the early days.....this book with it's pictures does great justice the this time period.

Excellent book full of beautiful color photography, little known history of the pioneer west, and great first-person narrative traveling rural Nevada. Long time Nevada photojournalist Marilyn Newton's explores Nevada's well known and long forgotten cemeteries, graveyards, and "boot hills." A "great read" by itself, the photography is stunningly beautiful and is a "must have" for anyone who loves the historical west or great photojournalism.

I bought this book after using and fully enjoying the Avant-Guide to Paris. I knew nothing about Vegas before a recent trip and Avant-Guide made sure I was well prepared. It had excellent information on cool and hip places as well as "classic Vegas" and must-see destinations. It covers it from the perspective of singles or couples. This is not a family vacation book or a budget travel book. It is fun to read and easy to navigate. Because of this I also bought the New York book which is equally enjoyable.

Dan Levine and his crew have experienced what they write about.It's based on reality,not on puffery. Savvy,irreverent at times, funny and wonderfully practical.It's extremely well organized and easy to use. I've read a ton of stuff on Vegas and this is the only one I actually use and give to others. Their opinions are the same as mine.

My only criticism is the binding. It tends to fall apart after many uses. Dan, would you consider spiral binding?

Thanks, Dan. Samuel Henderson

This book was my introduction to the Avant Guide series, and I was thoroughly impressed. I've been to Vegas several times and used as many guide books, but this is by far my favorite. The author demonstrates a refreshing respect for everything cool -- from groovy local dives to swanky tourist hot spots. If you wish to revel in all things Vegas -- if you dig the history and the kitsch -- this book will show you a good time regardless of your budget.

Be warned: Square types may find plenty to offend on these lively pages. Hotels are ranked from "Very Expensive" to "Cheap A--"; drugs and prostitution are given a comic wink; and the author makes a point of helping you avoid child-infested locations. If any of this sounds like a bad thing, you'd best avoid this book.

But for anyone with a healthy sense of humor, irony, and things absurd, this book is the next best thing to having a supercool, local friend guide your Vegas experience.

Beat the Players by Bob Nersesian, a Nevada lawyer who represents advantage players against the casinos, starts his preface with three stingingly dramatic words, "Nevada hates you...." - and the rest of the book attempts to prove why those three words have the ring of truth.

The casinos of Las Vegas, and by extension, the casinos throughout the United States have a love-hate relationship with their players. Most casino players don't realize this since most casino players are only thinking about one-half of the casino equation - the half they are on.

The casinos love the losers - who make up maybe 99.99+ percent of all the players, whose towering losses make casino gambling a multi-billion dollar industry - but the casinos hate the advantage players, those Davids who by skill and intellect have found ways to turn the tables on the casino Goliaths, beating those monstrous Goliaths at their own games. Goliaths don't like to lose to slingshot carrying Davids - that is for sure.

Nersesian's book goes through many of his cases, as well as other cases, where advantage players were mistreated and at times abused by casino security and even law enforcement personnel - even though these players were doing nothing illegal. Sadly casinos can ask players to stop playing and/or leave their properties even though the players are doing nothing illegal but the casino personnel are often not content to just do this - as the book brutally shows.

You'll read about phony charges of players cheating which are totally discredited by the security cameras; phony "eye-witness" reports that are totally discredited by the security cameras; and depositions where the security personnel and the police offer explanations that would be very funny in a National Lampoon movie, but are downright terrifying when you realize these are being made to hurt honest America citizens doing nothing wrong. Imagine a hero who fought for America in our wars; or one who rushed into the World Trade Center in New York after the terrorist attack to save those poor souls trapped therein, being told he can't play in an American casino because "you are too good" or, worse, being escorted to or being dragged into the "backroom" to be illegally detained. Disgraceful but it has happened - far too frequently.

The book is an eye-opener and a page-turner from start to finish. If you are a card counter, a shuffle tracker, a hole card catcher, or dice controller; even if you are only a smart casino gambler taking your best shot at the house - this book makes for enlightening and frightening reading.

Nersesian has done all of us who love to play the casino games a great service by showing us what has happened to some of our unfortunate fellows who have the temerity to be "too good."

Casinos use mathematics and intelligence in trying to beat the players. Their games are normally fair, but mathematically skewed so that they will win over the long run. Yet, may casinos abhor players that try to use their own intelligence and legal skills to win at the games of chance that the casinos offer. Some casinos take it way too far and illegally abuse these players. This is when attorney Bob Nersesian steps in. Nersesian represents players who are playing legally who have been unfairly and illegally treated by the casinos, casino security and possibly the police force as well. In Beat the Players, Nersesian writes about some of these situations and cases, many showcase the amazing stupidity of casino security forces and the police force. He also gives advice to players on how to act and what to expect in the casino security offices (the backroom), including when it is appropriate or inappropriate to use an alias. This book should be read by all smart gamblers simply to prepare themselves for what could happen.

This book should also be read by casino personnel and cops. Along with giving advice to players on their rights and what to expect, Nersesian also gives advice to the casinos and cops on what not to do and the misconceptions that they may have. Card counting is legal. Hole carding due to dealer's mistakes is legal. Abusing, illegally detaining and illegally searching patrons is not legal. In the short run, the bully casino security force may get some satisfaction, but in the long run, the casinos (and in these corporate days, their shareholders as well) suffer in paying out losses in court cases.

Although I am not a lawyer and much of this book deals with the law, I still found it very readable. This is due to the way Nersesian wrote the book. Anyone will find it readable and easy to understand. I recommend this book to all gamblers who play in casinos, and especially those that think they can win.

"The casino hates you."

That's the first sentence of the first chapter. Direct. Powerful. Compelling. Unambiguous. Authoritative. Easy to understand.

Just like the rest of the book.

This 320-page book should be read by everyone who patronizes, or is in any way associated with casinos in Las Vegas. A fascinating read by a Las Vegas attorney who is THE authority on the tactics and abuses casinos apply towards blackjack players they think is winning too much of "their" money.

The chapter titles are:

Your Money or Your Liberty;
Scary Cop Statements;
They'll Take Your Liberty Anyway;
Gaming Agents Speak;
The Take of the State;
Rules for Casino Patrons;
Gambling at the Legal Limits;
Cops Hate Card Counters;
Griffin Investigations;
Casinos Cheat With Impunity;
A Judicial and Government Overlay;
Finding a Nickel Brings Trouble;
Names and Aliases;
The Security Office and Surveillance Functions,
Casinos and Cops.

Learn your rights and what a casino can and cannot do to you and what you can do to do to protect yourself and substantiate your claims if you initiate a future lawsuit.

Learn of the cozy relationships between the casinos, the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and the Las Vegas Metro Police Department.

If you work in casino management or security or Surveillance, the NGCB, or Metro, learn the law (!) and how to protect yourself from those pesky lawsuits.

It's all here. It's scary. It's real. You need to know it.

Not only does this map label and explain all the interesting recreational features in the state, it also labels all the rural ranches and farms(!) We use it at the university! THANKS!!

When I purchased a Nevada Road & Recreation Atlas that had missing pages, Benchmark offered to correct the problem immediately. They responsed to my email in less than 24 hours. I've used 3 of their Atlases for different states and find them extremely useful.

I use this atlas for it's great off-road detail to plan and execute ATV trips. This is the BEST atlas I have found for off-road detail in Nevada and it hasn't let me down yet. It must be the best, since others in our ATV Club have it and refer to it often. I never see another atlas on the trail besides this one!

From a skilled architectual photographer one might be surprised to find the legal brothel as the subject of this elegant collection. First, the movies have created quite a different image of brothels. As opposed to the pleasure palaces of Victorian Chicago or the upstairs at the saloon, the real brothels of today's Nevada are mostly double wide house trailers singly or in groups (since in the beginning they had to be mobile because of changing zoning ordinances). The excellent large format images shown are not girly pictures and in fact there almost no human figures to be seen. Rather they are a demonstration of a part of America seldom seen and even less understood..
The economics of brothels is not well studied. Naturally owners are intent on the greatest possible profits from the least investment. Since the women work on a piece work basis (no pun) it is difficult to increase the throughput of the operation. To construct a spledid brothel is almost a conflict in terms. Instead, brothels are constructed as a compromise in tastes. What is the minimum place attractive to clients who by definition are unsophisticated but that will not affect business? The women in turn concoct their living-working rooms intended to demonstrate their own taste or lack of it.
For all the housewives with their fanatasies of escaping their bloated husband and being paid for those services thy have contributed in the past, the alternative of those clusters of double wides may be sometimes attractive.
Hursley has captured a lonely and wistful collection of images that are classic Americana. I urge you to read the companion book, "Brothel" by Alexa Albert to form your own conclusions.

This excellent book is more of an exotic voyeur's tour of the legal whore houses, actually trailers, of Nevada's brothels than it is a portrait of the prostitutes working in these houses of ill repute. Only a few or the working girls are seen in the book and in those cases they are only blurred fleeting figures, seen from the back working their Internet sites or practically invisible behind barely open blinds and screen covered windows. This is an architectural photographer's color documentation of what is probably a disappearing remnant of the Wild West. The photographer has won numerous Architectural awards including the "Architect's Honor Award." The book's publisher is the Princeton Architectural Press. It's important to know these facts if you are interested in the book, which is masterfully done in every way, but may not be what many potential readers are searching for. The title may suggest more eroticism than is actually in the tome. It's more a fancy coffee table art book designed to peak the interest of guests and spark some interesting before or after dinner conversations. It's contains only a hint of raciness. It's also a dark portrait of decay and human weakness.
Alexa Albert, M.D. writes a very brief introduction to Timothy Hursley's photographic studies of many of Nevada' s working, some now closed, brothels. Alexa Albert wrote "Brothel: Mustang Ranch and It's Women" about her lengthy study of prostitution and public health while attending Harvard Medical School. The books are somewhat like two facets of the same story. One is about the workingwomen, their safe sex practices, and the other is a comprehensive portrait of the same women's places of business. However, the two facets remain totally independent of each other.
"Brothels of Nevada" very much resembles "Love Hotels: The Hidden Fantasy Rooms of Japan" both in style and subject matter, although the Love Hotels of Japan are not brothels and are merely convenient meeting places for lovers from all walks of life.
The rather boring, Spartan, but occasional fancy trailers of Nevada's brothels are only a faint echo of the grand style of the Love Hotels of Japan, which are much more sophisticated and accepted fantasy worlds in every way.

It's a big jump from the lively paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec of prostitutes in Montmarte to Timothy Hursley's interesting coverage of America's only legal sex industry and the one big difference you'll notice is the understandable absence of people in the photos, consequently they offer a rather detached view of this very human activity.

The photos date from the mid-eighties to today so several of the buildings are no more. The five chapters geographically cover Nevada and Hursley seems to have visited most of the State's sex industry. He has tried to cover everything, the wire fenced entrances, parlours, bedrooms, recreation areas, kitchens and the rubbish bins outback. Several kitchen photos show cooking timers, used for obvious reasons. The Shamrock went to the trouble of making a custom unit to house their fourteen timers. The exterior shots suggest that these brothels are rather isolated (parking would never be a problem) though the Chicken Ranch, in 1986, thoughtfully provided a runway, shown on page forty-three.

Overall an interesting book of photos, good color and well designed. As a visual record of this particular area of American life Tim Hursley will probably retain his monopoly. I doubt anyone will do it better and just the book, in the bookcase, to sit next to Barbara Heyl's 'The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution' (ISBN 087855211)

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

This arrived in good shape and in good time. I appreciate it all.

The novel, Cassandra at the Wedding (first published in 1962), starts out simply enough; the first-person narrator, Cassandra Edwards, tells us that the spring semester has ended at Berkeley, California, where she is writing an M.A. thesis on the contemporary French novel; and she's packing a bag to drive to her parents' ranch near Tipton to attend her sister Judith's marriage to a truly lovable man. Not only is Cassandra a budding scholar, she's a talented pianist, and competitive swimmer, and she loves her sister more than anyone--even more than her sister's fiancee--so Cassie thinks. For this is the point: Cassie cannot bear to part with her nearly identical twin sister and will do almost anything to stop their wedding. As Cassie lets us deeper into her thought processes, the reader will find that--as learned and cultured as she is--Cassie isn't aware of the effects she has on others and on herself: Cassie is often cynical, passive aggressive, and wantonly perverse in her refusal to "get it," i.e., to love and let love. Her insolence towards the people she says she loves is an astonishing dismissal of their emotional lives. The fact that Dorothy Dodds Baker makes it easy for us to see Cassie without Cassie seeing herself is testament to the author's mastery of irony and understatement. Without a doubt Baker has created a character who is both infuriating and heroic. In fact, it's Cassie's youth and intelligence that makes her inability to let her sister go such a riveting contemporary drama. Also of note: The NYRB book cover is an appropriate painting by David Park; Deborah Eisenberg's "Afterward" is informative.

You're a twin --- so close to your sister that she moved across the country.

Now she's getting married to a man you've never met and cutting the cord for good.

And you're her only bridesmaid.

In the universe we now inhabit --- the urban chickscape of "Sex and the City" --- Cassandra Edwards would have a posse of smart-talking, Chardonnay-swilling pals to help her through this overwrought moment. They'd gab for hours about her choice of a bridesmaid's dress. They'd speculate about the groom's endowment. And they'd tease Cassandra for her ambivalence about catching the bouquet.

"Cassandra at the Wedding" is a stunning rebuke to that shallow-as-glass sensibility.

More to the point, it's a smart, stylish, disturbing novel --- a book much too good to languish at an Amazon.com ranking of 1,000,000.

But then, Dorothy Baker is not exactly a household name. Young Man with a Horn --- her fictionalized account of the doomed jazz great Bix Beiderbecke --- was published in 1938. It's pure pleasure; I've read it a dozen times since discovering it as a kid. I thought it was her only novel until a Butler reader tipped me to "Cassandra at the Wedding", the last of what turn out to be Baker's three novels.

Like "Young Man with a Horn," this novel begins effortlessly: "I told them I could be free by the twenty-first, and that I'd come home the twenty-second." That makes Cassandra seem chatty and friendly. Well, it doesn't take long for her bitchy side to surface. Example: Her twin's beloved is John Thomas Finch. Cassandra's comment: "Where'd she meet him --- Birdland?"

Soon we see that Cassandra is an inventory of neurosis. She's writing a thesis about French writers rather than be a writer --- her mother wrote plays and novels --- but she's stumbling even in her academic writing. Her biggest issue, naturally, is her twin. She's just obsessed. And with every detail of their lives. She was, she notes, born "two ounces heavier and eleven minutes older than the one named Judith."

As children, they lived on the Northern California ranch where Judith will be married. They came right home after school: "We didn't need people." Now, even though separated, they're so in tune with one another that they have both bought the same dress to wear at the wedding.

To Cassandra, that's one more metaphor for all that's wrong about Judith's wedding --- one more reason she must stop it. She explains this to us at great length, and some readers, wading through these pages, will think this book is just talk talk talk. It's not. Baker is doing something far more subtle and accomplished --- she's presenting a close account of an unraveling personality.

On the wedding day, there's an event. No spoilers here, but it's not the wedding, and it is a shocker. And it leads to more. And, in the end, you feel you've come to know some people at least as complex as you are and as twisted as some people you know.

Oh, there's a twitch I've failed to mention. "With men I feel like a bird in the clutch of a cat, terrified, caught in a nightmare of confinement, wanting nothing but to get free and take a shower," Cassandra tells us. Translation: She's gay. Context: "Cassandra" was published in 1962, so at no point is this ever made explicit. But you can read the entire book without being aware of her sexuality. For me, that's the mark of good writing.

In 1912 in the Sierras, life is not only hard for everyone, but most people believe they are worse off now than a few years ago. Ten years old Daisy James insists she sees angels, but her two older brothers and her younger siblings look upon her as a lunatic. Still, Daisy believes while knowing that all the townsfolk are sad, especially her mother Abigail, who stopped singing and laughing when she lost the baby last year.

Daisy has a plan to bring joy and God back into the lives of the beleaguered locals. She wants to build a church, but no one heeds the words of a preadolescent female. With the patience of Job, Daisy writes a play, COME, MY LITTLE ANGEL, in which she persuades her peers to participate on the journey back home.

COME, MY LITTLE ANGEL will catch the attention of the reader from start to finish with its "Little Engine that Could" story line to inspire everyone at a time we need books like this. The historical tale never slows down as readers feel the pain of the charcaters and the hopes of the little heroine who refuses to bend from peer, parental, and sibling pressure. Diane Noble provides a noble experience for those readers who need a lift or who want an angel in their life should share the novel with their children.

Harriet Klausner

A sparkling gem of a story that transcends season and settings! From the first page, COME MY LITTLE ANGEL tugged at my heartstrings, drawing me into young Daisy's magical world, infusing me with her unwavering hope. A timeless classic!

I decided to read this book based on a recommendation by Liz Curtis Higgs (one of my favorite authors)and I am so glad I did. This book is a wonderful little story about how God honors the faith of a child. I read alot of books and it has been a long time since one moved me to tears, but that is exactly what this one did. It is easy to focus on the bad things in this world, especially now, but this book reminds us that God does care about us and our world and he will answer prayer.