cover image Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, and the Race to Own Las Vegas

Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, and the Race to Own Las Vegas

Christina Binkley. Hyperion, $25.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-1-4013-0236-8

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Binkley offers this story of the “trio of tycoons” who took over Las Vegas and transformed it from a “crushed-velvet world” with a “libidinous frontier air” into a place where, increasingly and sometimes surprisingly, “entertainment and good taste go hand in hand.” Binkley provides an inside look at deal-maker Kerkorian, casino visionary Wynn and professor-turned-mogul Loveman and their lavishly competitive lives: their exclusive and “aggressive” tennis games, the one-way conveyor belt created to transport customers away from a competing casino, the battle to build the biggest and the best. The author shares intriguing details about these power players—Wynn has a secret entrance, behind some fake books on a shelf, to a sprawling closet—and is also adept at portraying a seedier Vegas, where aged Mafia barons dined “on the osso buco at Piero’s Italian restaurant, their canes hanging from their chairs.” Sometimes her chronology gets a little murky. Still, Binkley offers plenty of nuggets mined from her years on the beat, producing a full, flashy tale of powerful men and their pride, vanity, envy, greed—and all the other cardinal no-nos that earned Vegas the name “Sin City.” (Mar.)