Category: (Book)
5 new, starting at $45.78
14 used, starting at $11.95
With the intensity of a Jacobean tragedy, Casino unfolds its
tale of a love triangle between a gambler, his wife, and his
henchman amid the glittering, festering Babylon of Las Vegas. The
film makes daring use of voice-over and rapidly shifting points of
view and time frame, leaving conventional film language far
behind.
The author of the best-selling Wiseguy gives us this true and brilliantly-told story of love, marriage, adultery, murder, revenge, and how it led to the Mafia's finally losing its stranglehold on the Las Vegas casinos.
Good book, not so great conditionReviewed by J. Paul, 2009-10-15
I love the book, and know it is an older version. But the book was in very poor condition, with some kind of stuff all over every page. I guess I couldn't expect much more from a rare book.
Las Vegas tradition of greed and corruptionReviewed by B. Cawley, 2009-09-02
Nicholas Pileggi gives us a look into american business before modern Corporate America took over the sure money-maker of Gaming in Las Vegas, the biggest venue of this industry. Casino really has some juicy details about inner workings of government, gaming, and mob operations and how they work together to make money together. The details are juicy and accurate, or as accurate as they can be, because Pileggi uses actual court document, police reports, and interviews with the players themselves. What an intriguing mix of hard-tongue business negotians, domestic unrest, and cold-blooded murder.
Still a Thrilling Ride, Las Vegas Style!Reviewed by Sylviastel, 2009-04-29
The book has some writing problems like you can't tell who's
speaking to you at the time. The book is written by a variety of
different voices. I loved the movie, Casino. The book fills in a
lot of background details of the real-life characters and the movie
starring Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone. DeNiro plays
the lead character, Frank Lefty Rosenthal. In the movie, he's Ace
Rothstein. Pesci plays Tony Spilotero as Nick who will remind you
of Goodfellas role. Stone plays Ginger rather than Geri.
I still find the book interesting especially about how thorough it
is in regards to understanding the backgrounds of the mob, Las
Vegas, Chicago, and the neighborhoods of Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal
and Tony Spilotero's character. I always watching the movie but I
like watching it from the beginning. I can't stand watching it in
the middle but Scorsese did an excellent job in maintaining the
voices that inspired the movie.
Muddy Mob Story Lacks PunchReviewed by Bill Slocum, 2009-02-20
For years, Lefty Rosenthal and Tony Spilotro were two of Las
Vegas's heaviest hitters, Chicago boys who moved West to take
advantage of easy money and short odds. Lefty was bright and worked
through the system, however corrupt. Tony was a bully who shook
things up while looking out for himself.
The two characters are the center of Nicholas Pileggi's "Casino", a
true-crime account of Vegas during the 1970s and 1980s, when
organized crime used the gambling mecca as its own private money
tree.
Published in 1995 as a tie-in to the Martin Scorsese movie,
"Casino" the book is slightly different in that it offers the real
story rather than the fictionalized version seen in the film. The
characters don't pop off the page the way they do off the screen,
but they are better grounded by reality.
As with his earlier book "Wise Guy" (made into another Scorsese
movie, "Goodfellas"), Pileggi works with a lot of first-hand
testimony. He captures a sense of really hearing these guys as you
read the pages, tuning into their hard world. But a couple of
serious problems soon present themselves.
The first is that Pileggi doesn't have the same kind of story he
did with "Wise Guy". Instead of the record Lufthansa airport heist
memorably depicted there, you get a long story about how Joe got
mad when someone failed to show Gregory Peck's secretary a
good-enough time in Vegas. Pileggi offers this as an example of the
scut work that made Joe restless and difficult within the Mob, but
it's also the kind of smallball that makes "Casino" feel less vital
over time. People coming to this after seeing the movie are going
to be surprised by the relative lack of violence here. How many
times can you read about crimes that largely occurred inside
balance books?
The second issue is Pileggi's way of relying almost exclusively on
first-hand testimony, especially from Rosenthal. Lefty comes across
as a charmer, but also by his own account too removed from the
illegal aspect of the story. That may be Rosenthal's own spin; the
guy who was Rosenthal's nominal boss calls him a liar and
psychopath who was at the center of the mob skims. Rosenthal denies
any knowledge of skims.
This flies straight in the face of the portrait Pileggi paints, of
Lefty being so detail obsessed he counts blueberries in the muffins
his casino restaurants serve. Yet Pileggi leaves Rosenthal's denial
unchallenged in his minimal narration. In fact, he doesn't provide
much textual background for anything in "Casino", including how
important Rosenthal and Spilotro ultimately were to the Mob in
Vegas, just that Rosenthal was good at gambling while Spilotro
knocked over some jewelry stores.
Pileggi also gets a lot of mileage out of how Joe two-timed Lefty
with Lefty's gorgeous gold-digger wife. Geri Rosenthal's probably
the most interesting character, a force of will who demands
everything she can from life. She isn't sympathetic, but neither is
anyone else in this one-note book. That kind of grates after a
while.
you've seen the movie, now read the bookReviewed by guy incognito, 2009-02-06
seriously, read the book. if you liked casino but wanted a more just the facts account of the story, the book delivers. the book offers more points of views than the movie did and additional information to flesh out events.
