Walking through the doors of a casino can feel like entering a portal into another dimension. A cacophony of electronic and human sounds assaults the ears as you watch people transacting large amounts of money. But this is no ordinary purchasing of goods or services where you quietly wave a card or hand out notes from a purse. Instead, money is swapped for colourful plastic chips that are placed, pushed, and thrown onto gaming tables with seemingly reckless abandon by a wide array of people, young, old, cultured, relaxed, happy, and grim. Phil Watts, as an experienced forensic psychologist, knew a lot about human nature before he walked into his first casino at 40 years of age. He had treated clients with a wide range of difficulties including gambling, yet was still struck by the casino environment — an exciting world with its own culture, pace, rules, social etiquette, and shared expectations. This other world intrigued and surprised him. So, he wrote a book about it. Casino Life will be of interest to those who seeking to know more about casinos and their psychological effects, those who seek to find out why others gamble, and those who do gamble — not as a treatment, but as a window to see what you are doing and how that has an impact upon you. Along the way you will read about why people gamble, why gambling can become addictive and the treatments used to help problem gamblers, as well as the beliefs around gambling and some of the elaborate theories people use to explain why they try to defy mathematical odds. You will also learn about the fascinating cultural and behavioural patterns of everyday casino life.

machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. --

Caroline Popov, alone, heartbroken, and deeply in debt ends up in glamorous Palm Springs, California where Native casinos have just opened, offering employment to thousands. She lands a job at the Palm Oasis Casino where she is mentored by the charismatic tribal chairman, John Tovar. Embraced by casino culture, Caroline works her way up to casino manager of the Night Hawk, in the High Desert town of Joshua Tree. There, she is responsible for managing multicultural team members, satisfying the demands of often unique guests, and growing revenue while rooting out corruption. In the process of rediscovering her inner strength, she learns, you have to gamble like your life depends on it. Because it often does.

In this lively and probing book, award-winning author Pete Earley traces the extraordinary evolution of Las Vegas -- from the gaudy Mecca of the Rat Pack era to one of the country's top family vacation spots. He revisits the city's checkered history of moguls, mobsters, and entertainers, reveals the real stories of well-known power brokers like Steve Wynn and legends like Howard Hughes and Bugsy Siegel, and offers a fascinating portrait of the life, death, and fantastic rebirth of the Las Vegas Strip. Earley also documents the gripping tale of the entrepreneurs behind the rise and fall and rise again of one of the largest gaming corporations in the nation, Circus Circus -- to which he was given unique access. In his trademark you-are-there style, he takes us behind the scenes to meet the blackjack dealers and hookers, the heavy hitters and bit players, the security officers, cabbies, and showgirls who are caught up in the mercurial pace that pulses at the heart of this astounding city.

Buildings are not benign; rather, they commonly manipulate and abuse their human users. Architectural Agents makes the case that buildings act in the world independently of their makers, patrons, owners, or occupants. And often they act badly. Treating buildings as bodies, Annabel Jane Wharton writes biographies of symptomatic structures in order to diagnose their pathologies. The violence of some sites is rooted in historical trauma; the unhealthy spatial behaviors of other spaces stem from political and economic ruthlessness. The places examined range from the Cloisters Museum in New York City and the Palestine Archaeological Museum (renamed the Rockefeller Museum) in Jerusalem to the grand Hostal de los Reyes Católicos in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and Las Vegas casino resorts. Recognizing that a study of pathological spaces would not be complete without an investigation of digital structures, Wharton integrates into her argument an original consideration of the powerful architectures of video games and immersive worlds. Her work mounts a persuasive critique of popular phenomenological treatments of architecture. Architectural Agents advances an alternative theorization of buildings’ agency—one rooted in buildings’ essential materiality and historical formation—as the basis for her significant intervention in current debates over the boundaries separating humans, animals, and machines.

Book Description: Why are millions disgusted with our political parties? Did the huge explosion in the federal building in Oklahoma City make any sense? We wait nervously for another school shooting. What's next? America is changing so fast that laws and culture are almost meaningless. Escape from Time is the story of how we are divorcing the past. We are rid of the worst and the best of our inherited culture. We are what no other country has ever been. Culture--laws, religion, the "story of America"--belong to the immigrants who came looking for a future. Those immigrants are history. They lived for the future. We live for "right now." Past and future are not our psychological radar. We live by impulse. If it feelsright, it isright. We don't understand our culture, certainly not our laws and institutions. These relics manufacture "crimes" from what we call everday life, and we can't build enough prisons to keep up. Escape from Time is the story of a new way of life in America--life in the NOW! Read it and understand who we are; escape the fiction that we are who we were. Author bio: Frederick Kile—engineer, theologian, corporate futurist. As parish pastor, he encountered wealthy and poor, “old-timers” and social rebels. Engineering experience includes Project Apollo and designing global socioeconomic computer models. Currently adult education director in a large Lutheran church, Fred also chairs a multinational committee of engineers studying international stability.

In recent years the concept of 'civil society' has become central to the historian's understanding of class, cultural and political power in the nineteenth-century town and city. Increasingly clubs and voluntary societies have been regarded as an important step in the formation of formal political parties, particularly for the working and middle classes. The result of this is the assertion that the more associations existing in a particular society, the deeper democracy becomes entrenched. In order to test this hypothesis, this volume brings together essays by an international group of urban historians who examine the construction of civil society from associational activity in the urban place. From their studies, it soon becomes clear that such simple propositions do not adequately reflect the dynamics of nineteenth-century urban society and politics. Urban associations were ideological in purpose and deliberately discriminatory and as such set the boundaries of civil society. Thus competing and segmented associations were not only an indication of pluralism and strength, but also highlighted a fundamental weakness when faced down by the interests of the state. Through a wide array of urban associations in a broad range of settings, comprising Austria and Bratislava, France and Italy, the Netherlands, Austro-Hungary, England, Scotland and the US, this volume reflects on the construction of class, nation and culture in the associations of the nineteenth-century urban place. In so doing it shows that a deep and interlocking civil society does not automatically lead to a rise in democratic activity. Expansion of the networks of urban association could equally result in greater subdivision and to the fragmentation and isolation of certain groups. Partition as much as coherence is our understanding of civil society and associations in the nineteenth-century urban place.

This fictional story is about James Foxby, newly arrived in Dublin and finding work as a casino dealer. Here, confidentiality is taken to a whole new level. For this is no ordinary casino. And it appears that the laws of the land have no bearing or standing in the place. From drunken meetings with the general manager, the wild and unpredictable Herman Mink, to private blackjack games in a luxury hotel suite, James experiences some strange and fairly bizarre happenings. And he meets some quite extraordinary characters along the way. But he also comes to realise that a very sinister force is at work behind the scenes at the Green Bullion Club. And in the aftermath of him becoming caught up in an act of violence against a customer, the shocking truth about what happened makes him want to leave and not look back. However, once he begins an intimate relationship with one of the casino’s customers, leaving the country is the last thing he wants. James has not felt this happy in some time. But soon dramatic events signal the end of his short spell in Ireland, and the subtle, yet ever-present threat of violence from his employer becomes too much to bear. James cannot help but wonder, after the goodbyes and well-wishes are over, if he will be allowed to simply leave. And even once he has begun his journey home, it seems that Herman Mink has one more trick up his sleeve to make him stay.