Category Archives: Book Reviews

No Vacancy

No Vacancy: The Rise, Demise, and Reprise of America’s MotelsBy Mark Okrant, illustrations by Laura Hodgdon
Concord, New Hampshire: Plaidswede Publishing, 2013
138 pages, illus., $15.95 paper

Keith A. Sculle

Author Mark Okrant has launched readers on another nostalgic journey where small roadside lodgings serviced travelers overnight. In the introduction, he states of this book and its predecessor, Sleeping Alongside the Road (2006) they offer “a nostalgic look at the American motel, an American icon that is indelibly etched in the memories of nearly half of all Americans age forty and older” (p. ix).

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.