Gambling on a Dream: The Classic Las Vegas Strip 1930-1973

When you think of Las Vegas do you immediately think of the Sands Hotel's famed Copa Room or the Flamingo with its neon clad champagne tower?

Maybe it's Caesars Palace when there were wine goddesses and the staff dressed like Romans?

Perhaps you remember the beloved entertainers such as Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, Debbie Reynolds and lounge performers such as Louie Prima, Keely Smith and Sam Butera?

That era of the Strip was a heady cocktail of glamour, glitz and neon that has all but vanished from the Las Vegas Strip of today.

But that era lives on in our collective memory.

Now, you can relive that golden era with Gambling on a Dream: The Classic Las Vegas Strip 1930-1973. This multi-media book offers extensive histories of the first beloved hotels built on the famed boulevard.

From conception to implosion, with a few survival stories, each hotel's story includes rarely seen images and video clips featuring the men and women who worked, played and entertained there.

Meet the visionaries who dreamed large, built their dream hotels and turned a small, post-World War II town into America's Playground featuring sensational around-the-clock entertainment and legal gambling, during an era when Nevada was the only state to offer legalized gaming.

Learn how Howard Hughes helped usher in a new era of corporate ownership that forever changed the type of visionary builder who followed in his wake.

Hear stories about the men who ran the casinos and their connections with organized crime as well as the efforts to rid the hotels of their mob influence in the 1970s and 1980s.

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