Book reviews--Backstory and The Last Honest Place in America

Journalists are often tempted to cobble together some of their columns or pieces, used or unused, in order to produce what they hope will be perceived as a "book". The problems inherent in such an endeavor are obvious; most journalists do not usually write on the same theme or subject for many consecutive days or weeks. So journalists attempting to find enough articles to create a unified work long enough to fit the market's idea of what a "book" should be, must grab pieces written at disparate times and for differing purposes, all the while hoping for some sort of coherent whole to emerge from the process.
Journalists lucky enough to find the time and resources to devote to writing enough material to fill a traditional book, on the other hand, are sometimes incapable of pursuing a sustained theme or tonal consistency. This incapacity is not necessarily due to any attention deficit disorder (lower case, non-official designation), but rather because they are simply not trained to think or write using the longer forms. And even if journalists coming out of school were capable, the daily/weekly grind of publishing articles or columns would most likely soon atrophy either the desire or the skills necessary to publish book-length works.
An example of the former process in operation is Ken Auletta's Backstory. Auletta is definitely capable of putting together a book-length narrative; in fact his book Three Blind Mice was a brilliant interweaving of 3 interconnected yet distinct narratives. Backstory, on the other hand, is a less than successful effort to provide some background on some of the names behind the print news world. This collection of essays spans several decades in its presentation of journalist mini-biographies, although Auletta concentrates mainly on those editors and writers from the 1990s and early 2000s. The essays in and of themselves are consistently engaging, well-written, and illuminating, but the book does not really hang together as a whole. Part of the problem stems from the fact that I remain unsure what kind of coherence Auletta was aiming for. The essays are not put together chronologically by subject or by publication date, nor does it seem as though there is some underlying theme connecting one essay to another, even though Auletta has tacked on linking sentences at the end of each essay.
Marc Cooper's The Last Honest Place in America, on the other hand, while stylistically similar in that it contains a series of discrete essays on different topics, is constructed in such a way as to reinforce Cooper's theme. The last honest place in America, Cooper asserts wholly ironically, is Las Vegas, and each of his essays covers a separate aspect of post-Steve Wynn Vegas. Cooper addresses the hotel/casino business, the co-businesses of prostitution and stripping, politics (another business, seemingly), and of course, gambling, both from a player's perspective and also glimpsed from behind the scenes.
In these essays, Cooper makes it clear that while Las Vegas as a corporate entity presents itself to the world as a glamorous and above-board entertainment and gaming center, a more avaricious Las Vegas exists only slightly below that veneer. This ever-present greed is aimed, moreover, not just at the gullible tourists and gamblers, but also at the citizens and casino employees of modern Vegas itself, whose only functions, apparently, are to serve as lowly paid cogs in Vegas's capitalistic machine. Stories of the decline in civility among both gamblers and dealers, as well as a chapter on the possibly foredoomed attempts to unionize strippers and another noting the rise in the number of minimum-wage jobs where there were once better, make it obvious to the reader that while Vegas might be "honest", it is far from a nice place to make an honest living.
Compounding the ironies, Cooper details his own exciting gambling story that occurred while he interviewed his subjects and wrote the book. Cooper's disdain for what Las Vegas has become is thus juxtaposed against his clear affection for gambling, in addition to the sympathetic portraits he paints of some people whose lives revolve around gambling. While one would think this paradoxical approach would simply weaken Cooper's moral stance, instead it brings into dramatic relief the point that despite all its flaws, Las Vegas still attracts even smart and observant people willing to spend/lose a lot of money.