Reviewer Approaches Vegas History on Sliding Scale

Book reviewers tend to let their reviews speak for themselves, but in an unusual move, Steve Friess has supplemented his USA Today review of Winner Takes All, Christina Binkley‘s history of the sanitizing of Las Vegas “from a crass theme park of resorts into a world-class destination run by conglomerates,” with an article in Las Vegas Weekly elaborating Binkley’s factual errors.

The one-two punch gets weirder the more I think about it—because it’s not even a one-two punch at all, more like a handshake followed by a slap in the face. While Friess does tell USA Today readers the book is “pleasing, if flawed,” and mentions a few errors, the takeaway of his piece is that Binkley delivers “a compact, informative and entertaining story.” But when he returns to his hometown paper, the national verdict of “marred by some mistakes” escalates to “rife with factual mistakes,” and all of a sudden “Binkley almost despite her own sloppiness managed to render an intriguing and entertaining inside look at the past two decades of Vegas development.”

Why the conflicting spins? “In the context of a book review,” Friess tells his Vegas audience, “it isn’t possible to delve into the really important factual problems presented in this effort.” Really? Because it would seem to me that a book review is exactly the context in which you’re supposed to do that.

If you think a book is filled with “surprisingly shoddy fact-checking and a disappointingly casual familiarity… with important details of the city,” then you should come right out and say so, instead of soft-pedaling the book’s problems. Saying that a book is good except for all the stuff that’s wrong with it is an example of the ineffectual middle-of-the-road analysis that represents the real “crisis” in book reviewing. And doing that for one audience, then telling another what you really think, only makes the problem that much more blatant.

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