Cara is part of the Chatsfield family, the owners of a chain of luxury hotels. On the orders of the new CEO, Cara heads to Las Vegas in order to entertain customers at a hotel casino. This is Cara’s chance to restore her honor after having been labeled “the shame of the Chatsfield family.” But it doesn’t go smoothly! On top of her plane arriving late, superrich businessman Aidan Kelly practically mows her down, and he calls her a pink-haired prostitute! What an arrogant pig! Then just a few hours later, Cara meets Aidan again, and things go from bad to worse!
The collection of case studies maps the corporate and financial structures of global gambling companies, the tactics that these companies employ to secure profits, the impact they exert on other industry sectors, as well as perspectives on regulation. The articles in the book cover different geographical areas, gambling formats and perspectives into how the global gambling industry has emerged, expanded, and how it is maintained and regulated, in order to form a picture of the global political economy of gambling. The chapters are written by leading scholars on gambling law, social sciences and economy.Chapters [Chapter-No 3.] and [Chapter-No 6] are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Chance fills every day of our lives and affects every decision we make. Yet, for something woven so closely into the fabric of our being, we are not very good at thinking about uncertainty and risk. In this lively and engaging book, Andrew C. A. Elliott asks why this is so. He picks at the threads and, in showing how our world is built on probability rather than certainty, he identifies five obstacles to thinking about uncertainty that confuse us time after time. Elliott takes us into the casino, but this is not an invitation to gamble. He looks at financial markets, but this is not a guide to investment. There's discussion of health, but this is not a medical book. He touches on genetics and evolution, and music-making, and writing, because chance is at work there too. Entering many different fields, What are the Chances of That? is always following the trail of chance and randomness. One purpose of the book is to go cross-country, to show that there are connected ways of thinking that disrespect boundaries and cut across the domains of finance, and gambling, and genetics, and public health, and creativity. Through it, one visits the vantage points that give a broad view of the landscape and sees how these different areas of life and knowledge are connected - through chance. What are the Chances of That? discusses chance and the importance of understanding how it affects our lives. It goes beyond a mathematical approach to the subject, showing how our thinking about chance and uncertainty has been shaped by history and culture, and only relatively recently by the mathematical theory of probability. In considering how we think about uncertainty, Elliott proposes five “dualities” that encapsulate many of the ambiguities that arise.
When Pittsburgh socialite Laura Corey rolled into Reno, Nevada, in 1905 for a six-month stay, her goal was a divorce from the president of U.S. Steel. Her visit also provided a provocative glimpse into the city's future. With its rugged landscape and rough-edged culture, Reno had little to offer early twentieth-century visitors besides the gambling and prostitution that had remained unregulated since Nevada's silver-mining heyday. But the possibility of easy divorce attracted national media attention, East Coast notables, and Hollywood stars, and soon the "Reno Cure" was all the rage. Almost overnight, Reno was on the map. Alicia Barber traces the transformation of Reno's reputation from backward railroad town to the nationally known "Sin Central"—as Garrison Keillor observed, a place where you could see things that you wouldn't want to see in your own hometown. Chronicling the city's changing fortunes from the days of the Comstock Lode, she describes how city leaders came to embrace an identity as "The Biggest Little City in the World" and transform their town into a lively tourist mecca. Focusing on the evolution of urban reputation, Barber carefully distinguishes between the image that a city's promoters hope to manufacture and the impression that outsiders actually have. Interweaving aspects of urban identity, she shows how sense of place, promoted image, and civic reputation intermingled and influenced each other—and how they in turn shaped the urban environment. Quickie divorces notwithstanding, Reno's primary growth engine was gambling; modern casinos came to dominate the downtown landscape. When mainstream America balked, Reno countered by advertising "tax freedom" and natural splendor to attract new residents. But by the mid-seventies, unchecked growth and competition from Las Vegas had initiated a downslide that persisted until a carefully crafted series of special events and the rise of recreational tourism began to attract new breeds of tourists. Barber's engaging story portrays Reno as more than a second-string Las Vegas, having pioneered most of the attractions-gaming and prizefighting, divorces and weddings-that made the larger city famous. As Reno continues to remold itself to weather the shifting winds of tourism and growth, Barber's book provides a cautionary tale for other cities hoping to ride the latest consumer trends.
From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and culture critic Christina Binkley comes an updated edition of her New York Times bestselling account of sex, drugs, and the rise of Las Vegas. With a new prologue on the rise and fall of Steve Wynn. The Strip. Home to some of the world's grandest, flashiest, and most lucrative casino resorts, Las Vegas, with its multitude of attractions, draws millions of tourists from around the world every year. But Sin City hasn't always been booming: modern Vegas exists largely thanks to the extraordinary vision, and remarkable hubris, of three competing business moguls: Kirk Kerkorian, Dr. Gary Loveman, and Steve Wynn. And in the wake of #MeToo revelations, not all empires survive. Having had personal access to all three tycoons, Binkley explains how their audacious efforts to reach the top-and to top one another-shaped the city as it stands. She takes us inside their grandest schemes, their riskiest deals, and the personalities that drove them to their greatest successes, and their most painful defeats. In this updated edition, she reveals the inside story of how Steve Wynn, the winner who took all, ultimately lost everything-twice. Sharp, insightful, and revealing, Winner Takes All is the gripping story of how billions of dollars and the unparalleled drive for power turned dreams into larger-than-life reality. "It's a great drama on the greatest stage. . . Wynn, Kerkorian, and Loveman represent three opposing business personalities, three styles of achieving success. On the Vegas Strip, they're pitted against one another like gladiators, and we've got front-row seats. Kapow!" - bestselling author Po Bronson
Returning for its second year but reimagined in a new impulse format, with a new title, new cover, new mission, and new sensibility, here is The Socialite Who Killed a Nazi with Her Bare Hands, a pithier, quirkier collection of the 164 best page-turning obituaries from The New York Times. Written by top journalists, each story is a gem of a bio, a full life in miniature. There’s the famous: Steve Jobs, including the story of how he was reunited with a sister he never knew, the novelist Mona Simpson. And the almost famous: Ruth Stone, a poet who worked in relative obscurity until she won the National Book Award at the age of 87. The behind-the-scenes, like Arch West, inventor of the Dorito, who pulled America’s snacks out of the 1950s doldrums and created a $5-billion-a-year product, and the out-there, like self-styled anarchist and maverick artist (and real estate mogul and museum director) Bob Cassilly, who died at the controls of his bulldozer while building “Cementland” in St. Louis. And because of the chronological organization of the book, the stories, one next to the other, make for an addictive-as-salted-peanuts book: Mark O. Hatfield, the celebrated antiwar Republican senator from Oregon, next to Nancy Wake of the title, the impoverished New Zealander who grew up to become a high-society hostess and heroine of the French Resistance—the socialite who did, indeed, kill a Nazi with her bare hands.
LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.
This book is the first systematic study of the relations between German high society and the Nazis. It uses unpublished archival material, private diaries and diplomatic documents to take us into the hidden areas of power where privileges, tax breaks, and stolen property were exchanged. Fabrice D'Almeida begins by examining high society in the Weimar period, dominated by the old imperial aristocracy and a new republican aristocracy of government officials and wealthy businessmen. It was in this group that Hitler made his social debut in the early 1920s through the mediation of conservative friends and artists, including the family of the composer Richard Wagner. By the end of the 1920s, he enjoyed wide support among socialites, who played a significant role in his access to power in 1933. Their adherence to the Nazi regime, and the favors they received in return, continued and even grew until defeat loomed on the horizon. D'Almeida shows how members of German high society sought to outdo each other in showing zealous support for Hitler, how the old elites starting with the Kaiser's sons partied alongside parvenus, and how actors, aristocrats, SS technocrats, and diplomats came together to form a strange imperial court. Women also played a role in this theatre of power; they were persuaded that they had gained in dignity what they had lost in civil rights. There emerges a fascinating and disturbing picture of a group that allowed nothing - not war, the plundering of Europe, nor the extermination of peoples - to alter their cynical enjoyment of pleasures: hunting, regattas, the opera, balls, dinners and tennis. More than a study of a class or a chronicle, this book lifts the veil that has concealed a society that used secrecy to protect itself. High Society in the Third Reich makes an important and unique contribution to the current reevaluation of the extent to which German society, including German high society, was responsible for Hitler's accession to power and the crimes that were committed by his regime.
Sister-Queens in the High Hellenistic Period is a cutting-edge exploration of ancient queenship and the significance of family politics in the dysfunctional dynasties of the late Hellenistic world. This volume, the first full-length study of Kleopatra III and Kleopatra Thea and their careers as queens of Egypt and Syria, thoroughly examines the roles and ideology of royal daughters, wives, and queens in Egypt, the ancient Near East, and ancient Israel and provides a comprehensive study of the iconography, public image, and titles of each queen and their cultural precedents. In addition, this book also offers an introduction to the critical concept of the ‘High Hellenistic Period’ and the maturation of royal female power in the second century BCE. Sister-Queens in the High Hellenistic Period is suitable for students and scholars in ancient history, Egyptology, classics, and gender studies, as well as the general reader interested in ancient queenship, ancient Egypt, the Hellenistic world, and gender in antiquity.
