Author Description

Every year nearly 30 million people from across America and around the world make a pilgrimage to a strange and wonderful land of beauty and mystery buried deep in the heart of the desert. It is a city of bright lights, soaring imagination, and hopes and dreams, filled with magnificent palaces, brilliant performers, beautiful showgirls, and wild and exotic animals. It is a place where fortunes are made and lost and made again in a single night, a place where Elvis and Liberace live on beyond the grave, and it is, perhaps, the only place in the world where you don't have to wait `til morning to tell the one you love, "I do." Welcome to Planet Vegas!Planet Vegas is the most spectacular and comprehensive photographic celebration of Las Vegas ever undertaken. In more than 200 stunning color photographs, from twenty of the world's leading photojournalists, Planet Vegas captures the beauty, grandeur, and complexity of this glorious fantasy land of neon lights, free-flowing cash, and unrivaled showmanship. Once known as "Sin City" for its casinos and bawdy stage shows, Las Vegas has transformed itself again and again to become the grandest and most audacious capital of family entertainment the world has ever known. But Las Vegas is no longer just America's premiere show-place, it is also the country's fastest growing city and home to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who make the city run and give it its spirit. Planet Vegas takes us deep into both of these worlds in dozens of stunning images, showcasing the rich and varied sights and sensations that could only be found there: the giant sphinx poised outside the pyramid-shaped Luxor hotel and casino, Siegfried and Roy at home on their ranch surrounded by royal white tigers and a pure white lion, a glimpse behind-the-scenes of the worlds largest buffet, the stark, natural beauty of Red Rock Canyon, Elvis Presley look-alikes by the bushel, the majesty of the luminescent fountains outside Caesars Palace, the heavily guarded casino counting rooms, through which millions of dollars in cash and chips pass each day, and the Stratosphere Tower, the tallest free-standing building west of the Mississippi. Planet Vegas also shows us scenes from the Las Vegas most visitors never seeimages of the people who grow up, get married, go to work, have babies, and live just like everyone else. From the first light of dawn until the wee hours of another unforgettable night, Planet Vegas takes readers on a breathtaking visual romp. In page after page of dramatic photographs, it captures forever the distinctive spirit of this unrepentantly garish, yet undeniably alluring city of American hopes and dreams.