LVW Col: Three Vegas Books

I took on three new Vegas books this week. So far, one author is ecstatic and one "author" is stomping his feet like a little girl. (See her precious rant in the comments.) That's how it goes when you call a hack a hack. Enjoy. -sf

The good, the bad and the meh:
The read on three new Vegas books

By STEVE FRIESS

I hate reading books by local authors I know. If I dislike them, I want to say so and that gets awkward. So I try not to.

Recently, though, two writers insisted: former CityLife scribe Matthew O’Brien and Weekly staffer Rick Lax. And just as I dug into their latests, Stephens Media sent a copy of prolific Vegas biographer Jack Sheehan’s newest. Three is a nice round number to journalists, so I spent the first week of 2011 plowing through them.

Of them, I most dreaded O’Brien’s My Week At the Blue Angel.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

I Have A New Book Out

I wrote this. I even shot some of the pictures. It just came out. It's a really cool, compact little pocket-sized guide with fold-out maps of Las Vegas and its environs (including the Grand Canyon) and provides lots and lots of travel advice. It's also only $10.

I'll be adding autographed copies to the prize list for "The Strip" trivia questions. I don't receive royalties -- I did receive a significant advance -- so I don't care where you buy it, although I found it available online here and here. But I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

Another day, another feud

David McKee seems like a nice fellow. He's certainly a good blogger over at the Las Vegas Advisor's spiffy new site. I even have it bookmarked. And he even quoted me in a piece he wrote a long while back about the Broadway-to-Vegas trend for Las Vegas CityLife. Plus, he contributes nicely to RateVegas.Com's VegasGang podcast. Check it out.

So I had fairly warm feelings about the guy. Well, I did until some of readers pointed me to this really offensive, totally out-of-line comment he wrote in the comments section of said blog last night. A poster had questioned how McKee could be such a fan of "Winner Takes All" by Christina Binkley after having read the extensive list of factual mistakes I set forth in last week's Las Vegas Weekly column. And this was his baffling response:

"Eh, if memory serves, Friess found some ticky-tack goofs (like the "Gans/Ganz" discrepancy) and made a federal case of them. Steve Wynn is Friess' bread-and-butter guest on "The Strip Podcast"; Wynn has made his displeasure with "Winner Takes All" known and ... you do the math."

Now, there ought to be a code amongst Vegas bloggers, but there isn't. And since McKee opted to write this on his open forum, I thought I'd respond on mine.

Dear David:

How about not "going on memory" but instead actually reading what I wrote?

In my USA Today review of Binkley's book, I praised it extensively and specifically noted her even-handed portrayal of Wynn in all his contradictions: "Wynn, developer of the Mirage, Bellagio and Wynn Las Vegas, is seen as filled with contradictory traits. In anecdote after anecdote, Binkley illustrates his magnanimity, egotism, eloquence, weirdness, humor, insecurity, pettiness. The fact she had terrific access to him did not tilt her evenhanded portrayal. At times, she is deliciously dishy in a way that is unlikely to get another interview, as when she implies Wynn had cosmetic surgery."

Even in my Weekly commentary, I also had nice things to say about the book overall and still recommend(ed) it. But the fact is that there were an unforgivable list of very serious -- not "ticky/tack" (what does that mean, anyhow?) factual errors that I find inconceivable from coming from a Wall Street Journal writer. Any two or three of these mistakes would have had her benched at many of the papers you and I have written for. (Well, if you've written for the Las Vegas Sun, perhaps not. They don't seem to mind.)

Binkley invented at least one phone call, pretends that airplanes can land at airports they can't, has people as parties to deals they didn't make. And since the book came out and this list was published, there have been a long list of further mistakes that have been brought to my attention.

She also seems to have crafted a book entirely around not detached news judgment but who gave her access. I have very little problem -- in fact I was delighted -- by her portrayal of Wynn. He's complicated and her rendering is also complicated. But her ignoring of Adelson? Her minimizing of Lanni? Her infusing Loveman with responsibilities and accomplishments that weren't his alone? I was much more indignant about her treatment of other Vegas figures. When she's on the topic of Wynn, her work largely sings -- even with errors so baffling and careless that they must force the in-the-know reader to wonder about the accuracy of other parts of the tome.

Yet what's most offensive is this weird implication that I'm a lackey for anybody, much less Steve Wynn. Do you actually read my work and listen to our show? Do you know how many times I have been on the receiving end of Wynn's ire? Sometimes our interviews are cordial, often he finds me obnoxious. C'est la vie.

Listeners and readers have often thought that perhaps Wynn just likes my spunk, likes being challenged. That could explain how we met in the first place; I wrote a scathing review of the new Wynn resort for the Chicago Tribune and he called not to bawl me out but to invite me to let him show me the hotel himself. OK, he bawled me out, too. But after a two-hour discussion in which I defended myself point by point, he decided to give me the walk-about. Something tells me that wouldn't have happened if I had cowered and quivered before him.

For the record, I obtained a copy of WTA in December, but it was an uncorrected galley proof and I believed it proper to give Binkley the fix to correct many of the glaring errors in the final product. But she didn't. Then I had to wait for my USAT review to run before I could expand on it in my Weekly column. So that explains my timing, not some errand being run on behalf of a pooh-bah. I've taken guff from the GalleyCat blog for that approach, to which I've responded. And so it goes.

But you make it sound as if Wynn called me up and said, "Stevie boy, ya gotta go after this broad." Are you serious? Or are words just that cheap? I do give Wynn -- and Adelson and Lanni -- a chance to respond to the book in tomorrow's Weekly column, but then I give Binkley the last word as well.

I expect non-media people to "do the math" as you say. They're unaware of how journalists actually operate and aren't expected to do their research before they make off-handed remarks.

You, Mr. McKee, are a lot better than that. I do encourage folks to read your blog. It's excellent and clearly takes a lot of work. I just wish you'd taken an extra millisecond to think about what you were saying about a colleague before you insulted my reputation.

Best,
Steve

P.S. And yes, I did enjoy "Double Or Nothing" by Tom Breitling. It was a surprisingly well-written rendering of an interesting and specific Vegas tale. It isn't anything more than it purports to be, a subjective memoir, and is benefits from lower expectations. As opposed to Binkley's effort, which is harmed by the extremely high expectations we rightfully have for a journalist of her stature.

Three Books You Should Read

This is going to sound really odd, but I just finished three books that should never be read back to back to back and came away surprised by all three in different, pleasant ways.

1. "Annie Duke: How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed, and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker." The world's most successful female poker star writes a memoir accessible not just to poker fans but to anyone intrigued by how a pioneering woman navigates through a very tough male-dominated profession. What's more, Annie Duke isn't afraid to discuss her personal travails, namely an in-depth chronicle of her life of panic attacks. Catch my interview with her and her famous brother, Howard Lederer, on "The Strip" this upcoming week.

2. "Drop Dead Beautiful." Bestselling author Jackie Collins' next potboiler is being launched this weekend in Vegas, where it's largely set as a tale involving an effort to halt the opening of the heroine's new megaresort. It was campy, silly, utterly addictive and so full of sex that there's a blowjob on, I think, the fifth page -- and Ms. Collins reveals on this week's episode of "The Strip" that her publisher wanted that scene to open the book but she demurred. What restraint! My aunt tells me we don't call this "trash" anymore; it's now known as "beach reading." Mmhmm. Hear the Jackie Collins interview here or right-click to save it to your computer to hear at your leisure.

3. "The Year of Magical Thinking." So then I moved on, naturally, to Joan Didion's National Book Award Winner. I had hesitated to read what seemed likely to be an unrelentingly depressing memoir of the year in which her husband died and her daughter lay deathly ill, but it turned out to be a lovely, sensitive and remarkably thoughtful meditation on the experience of grief and the strange things it does to normal, sane people. Didion forced me to ponder who the great relationships of my life are whose death would launch me into that kind of mourning; in other words, a book on death and loss succeeded in prompting me to take stock and feel grateful for life, mine and those around me. That said, the book did drag a bit near the end, even at 226 pages, and became a little redundant. Well worth it, but mercifully succinct.

So now I'm low on books. Any suggestions?