From the barren desert, a booming metropolis

"There may be some who feel that Las Vegas is an abomination and should be destroyed," Mario Puzo wrote in 1977. "They would have to argue, with me at least, that the oil companies are straight, the stock market is not a flimflam, and that our [foreign] policy is not insane. They would even have to argue that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are more honest than the Mafia."

So begins Geoff Schumacher's exploration of modern Las Vegas, quoting the creator of filmdom's enduring symbol of organized crime, to introduce a city that is a font of enormous wealth whose main industry produces nothing. Begun as a remote oasis of legal vice in the Nevada desert, it grew into a national emblem of widespread corruption, the glitzy capital of "anything goes."

But it's not the dazzling casinos, caricatured mobsters or colorful history that interests Schumacher. "Sun, Sin & Suburbia: An Essential History of Modern Las Vegas" examines how what was once thought to be the country's most aberrant city has evolved into a magnet for America's middle- and upper-middle classes to put down roots. Part cultural theory, part urban studies, he documents the transformation of this notorious frontier boomtown into a modern Sunbelt metropolis.

Dozens of books have been written about Las Vegas, their jackets usually promising the "definitive" account. But the fluidity of its story makes such definition elusive, each tome obsolete by publication date. Now, however, the impressively researched and highly readable "Sun, Sin & Suburbia" captures the intangible nature of the dynamic, ever-changing city. Schumacher combines skills from his 16 years of work as a reporter, editor and columnist in Las Vegas with a scholar's perspective and historian's sensibility that are so often lacking in books by journalists, justifying the subtitle's adjective "essential."

Las Vegas attracts 35 million visitors a year. What concerns Schumacher, however, is the city of 1.6 million residents, the fastest-growing place in America since the mid-20th century with an estimated 25% of its transplants now pouring in from California. The population explosion that occurred in the super-boom period of the 1990s went beyond all previous expansion. How residents and civic leaders, developers and environmentalists have responded to this growth is Schumacher's story. The first chapters tell the obligatory tale of the city's rise, dispelling some myths (Bugsy Siegel was not the city's founding father) and perpetuating others (federal and state authorities pushed the mob "once and for all" out of the gambling industry in the 1980s). The pages on the evolution of the Las Vegas Strip are somewhat unsatisfying, lacking context and detail, but the author deftly moves the narrative forward to the defining decade.