Category Archives: Book Reviews

Bowlarama: The Architecture of Mid-Century Bowling

Bowlarama: The Architecture of Mid-Century Bowling
By Chris Nichols with Adriene Biondo
Angel City Press, 2024
Hardcover, 176 pages, $40

Reviewed by Ronald Ladouceur

A chatty and charming companion to Thomas Hine’s Populuxe (1986) and Alan Hess’s Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture (1986). Bowlarama, a handsome, fact-filled book chronicles the entire history of bowling, but focuses the half half-decade between 1957 and 1962, when separate streams of technology, suburbanization, and entertainment culture combined to fuel the development of fantastic and monumental architectural confections throughout the west and across the country.

Mapping Historical Las Vegas: A Cartographic Journey

Mapping Historical Las Vegas: A Cartographic Journey
By Joe Weber
Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2022
Softcover, 344 pages, $36

Reviewed by Ralph S. Wilcox

The book is liberally illustrated with more than 135 maps and photographs. I was pleasantly surprised that a book illustrated with so many maps wasn’t overly technical. Although Weber is currently a professor of geography at the University of Alabama, he grew up near Las Vegas. As a result, his intimate knowledge of Las Vegas and its surrounding area, including Boulder City, Hoover Dam, and Henderson, is apparent. Weber’s book begins with the natural setting in which Las Vegas developed, including the area’s allimportant water resources, which were vital in the initial settling of the region by the area’s indigenous groups and later by Mexicans and Mormons and the routing of the Old Spanish Trail. Initially, Las Vegas was a Mormon fort and rancho, but that changed in the early 20th century when surveyors for the railroad arrived.

Signs of the Signs: The Literary Lights of Incandescence and Neon

Signs of the Signs: The Literary Lights of Incandescence and Neon
By William Brevda
Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2011
Hardcover, 405 pages, $129

Reviewed by Paul Sherman

Brevda’s book is primarily a compilation of journal articles that the Central Michigan University English professor (now emeritus) wrote in the 1990s and 2000s, supplemented with a few more recent chapters. F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren, and Jack Kerouac are among the authors Brevda tackles.