The Vatican to Vegas

The Vatican to Vegas

Author: Norman M. Klein

Publisher:

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 9781565848030

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This is a journey through the lavish special-effects environments from 1550 to the present. It indicates how the Renaissance and early Baroque artists pioneered the interactive, the cinematic and even the digital.


Leaving Las Vegas

Leaving Las Vegas

Author: John O'Brien

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 0802197299

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This “brutal and unflinching” novel of fleeting love in Sin City inspired the film starring Nicholas Cage and Elizabeth Shue (Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City). John O’Brien’s debut novel, Leaving Las Vegas, is an emotionally wrenching story of a woman who embraces life and a man who rejects it; a powerful tale of hard luck, hard drinking, and a relationship of tenderness and destruction. An avowed alcoholic, Ben drinks away his family, friends, and, finally, his job. With deliberate resolve, he burns the remnants of his life and heads for Las Vegas to end it all in the last great binge of his hopeless life. On the Strip, he picks up Sera, a prostitute, in what might have become another excess in his self-destructive jag. Instead, their chance meeting becomes a respite on the road to oblivion as they form a bond that is as mysterious as it is immutable.


The Money and the Power

The Money and the Power

Author: Sally Denton

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2002-05-07

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 0375414444

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Las Vegas—the name evokes images of divorce and dice, gangsters and glitz. But beneath it all is a sordid history that is much more insidious and far-reaching than ever imagined. The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal the city’s historic network of links to Wall Street, international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen, and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history. Now this neon maelstrom of ruthlessness and greed stands to not as an aberrant “sin city,” but as a natural outgrowth of the corruption and worship of money that have come to permeate American life.


Vatican City, Las Vegas

Vatican City, Las Vegas

Author: F. Rex

Publisher: ICCC Media

Published: 2008-04-01

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 9780978826109

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In a Las Vegas casino fashioned after the Vatican, author Thomas Carlyle is as good as dead. Swilling a mortal dose of alcohol, he will perish among the grotesque patrons of Vatican City, Las Vegas as they pursue an elusive jackpot token called The Godhead. Carlyle unwittingly bumbles through corporate mafia intrigue as Vatican City's management, the Medici Crime Family, plots to enslave all the casino patrons to dreams of eternal wealth. As the night deepens and the forces of Vegas evil threaten to rob human existence of all nonmaterial significance, Carlyle dreams a final reckoning that will bring the Medici Crime Family and all of Vatican City's managerial clergy to justice in a shocking cinematic twist.


The Vatican Knights

The Vatican Knights

Author: Rick Jones

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2016-06-11

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 9781534651876

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While on a visit to the United States, Pope Pius XIII is kidnapped by a terrorist cell calling itself the Soldiers of Islam. If the United States and its allies do not meet their demands, they will execute the pope. So when FBI Specialist Shari Cohen is called to duty to track down the terrorist cell responsible, she learns that she is not alone. Deep behind the Vatican walls a secret order dispatches a clandestine op group of elite commandos known as the Vatican Knights. Their mission: bring the pope back alive. As Cohen and the Knights work in tandem they uncover a White House conspiracy involving high-ranking members on Capitol Hill. When she begins to get too close to the truth about the pope's kidnapping, she becomes the target of indigenous forces trying to keep the conspiracy safe. However, in order to get to her they must go through the Vatican Knights.


The History of Forgetting

The History of Forgetting

Author: Norman M. Klein

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2008-08-17

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1844672425

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Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an ‘anti-tour’ of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. In this new edition, Norman Klein examines new models for erasure in LA. He explores the evolution of the Latino majority, how the Pacific economy is changing the structure of urban life, the impact of collapsing infrastructure in the city, and the restructuring of those very districts that had been ‘forgotten’.


The King of Las Vegas

The King of Las Vegas

Author: John Van Stry

Publisher:

Published: 2016-03-18

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9781530675418

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An American college student on holiday in India, Rafael fell afoul of a Rakshasa, an old and very powerful tiger-demon. When he finally manages to escape from his captivity, he is left with two small problems; the first is that he is now a Rakshasa himself, the second is that India is deporting him. With a now rather unique physical appearance and a pressing need to find strong emotions that he can feed off of, just where in America can a shape-shifting tiger-demon not only survive, but find acceptance and make a life? Las Vegas of course. But before he can claim his territory, there is the small matter of a vampire infestation that he'll have to deal with, one that the government hasn't been able to clean up since the forties. All while finding or creating enough of those very emotions he needs to survive. For someone skilled in the arts of seduction, with the best Elvis act that the city has ever seen, that may not sound like much of a problem, but just what happens when someone who needs 'love' to survive meets up with the real thing?


The Themed Space

The Themed Space

Author: Scott A. Lukas

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9780739121429

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The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation and Self is the first edited collection focused on the subject of the themed space. Twelve authors address a range of themed spaces, including restaurants, casinos, theme parks and other spaces like airports and virtual reality ones. The text is organized into four sections-theming as authenticity, theming as nation, theming as person and theming as mind.


The Secret Lives of Buildings

The Secret Lives of Buildings

Author: Edward Hollis

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2009-11-10

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1429982101

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A strikingly original, beautifully narrated history of Western architecture and the cultural transformations that it represents Concrete, marble, steel, brick: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Outliving their original contexts and purposes, buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. To survive, they must become shape-shifters. In an inspired refashioning of architectural history, Edward Hollis recounts more than a dozen stories of such metamorphosis, highlighting the way in which even the most familiar structures all change over time into "something rich and strange." The Parthenon, that epitome of a ruined temple, was for centuries a working church and then a mosque; the cathedral of Notre Dame was "restored" to a design that none of its original makers would have recognized. Remains of the Berlin Wall, meanwhile, which was once gleefully smashed and bulldozed, are now treated as precious relics. With The Secret Lives of Buildings, Edward Hollis recounts the most enthralling of these metamorphoses and shows how buildings have come to embody the history of Western culture.


The Big Book of Chic

The Big Book of Chic

Author: Miles Redd

Publisher: Assouline Publishing

Published: 2020-06-24

Total Pages: 5

ISBN-13: 1614280614

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Internationally acclaimed interior design sensation Miles Redd is known for his quirky brand of cozy glamour. His unique aesthetic vision is characterized by playful mélanges of high and low, invigorated with whimsical splashes of color and modern gestures. Drawing on inspirations ranging from Richard Avedon fashion photographs to Rene Gruau illustrations, Redd has crafted interiors for a wide array of venues. His Trademark approach to design has brought to life rooms infused with boldness, fantasy, and sophistication. This lavishly illustrated volume will be an inspiration to anyone interested in spirited, eclectic design.