Roughly a quarter of a million acres of land spanning much of Utah and most of Nevada, the Great Basin is the highest and driest of the American deserts, a vast empty tract on the nineteenth-century maps of our continent. Explorers and cartographers found it imponderable; pioneers and settlers found it uninhabitable. And today the Great Basin remains a largely unknown and forbidding landscape, one that...

Las Vegas, says William Fox, is a pay-as-you-play paradise that succeeds in satisfying our fantasies of wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption that go with it. In this context, Fox examines how Las Vegas s culture of spectacle has obscured the boundaries between high art and entertainment extravaganza, nature and fantasy, for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. His purview ranges from casino art galleries including Steve Wynn s private collection and a branch of the famed Guggenheim Museum to the underfunded Las Vegas Art Museum; from spectacular casino animal collections like...