If any contemporary city in the United States can be considered a boom town, it's Las Vegas. During the 90s, Clark County, Nevada grew by 64%, and even though this growth rate has slowed somewhat in recent years, still on the order of 4000 to 5000 new people move to town every month. Certainly, anyone who has known this city for even a few years has witnessed its amazing growth. Consequently, there is a built-in and continually regenerating market for book that provides advice for the many bodies that make Las Vegas their new home.
The authors of Moving to Las Vegas are well-known Las Vegas newspaper columnist and author John L. Smith and his wife Patricia Smith. Previous editions were coauthored by Theresa Mataga. Mataga conceived of the idea for the book after moving to Las Vegas herself, and a good idea it is. Las Vegas is a fascinating city different from any other that I've seen. In the same way that visitors encounter sights and sounds unlike any they've experienced elsewhere, living in Las Vegas also presents its own unique challenges.
A lot of good information is contained in this book that will be of interest to its target audience. We learn about local utilities and their requirements for service hookups. We also get information about local shopping options and some information about the rapidly changing Las Vegas real estate market. The Smiths also provide information about the state of education in the state of Nevada, and discuss many other relevant topics.
Additionally, Moving to Las Vegas provides a lot of information of a more trivial nature. Sometimes the book reads a little more like a travel guide than information for new residents. Profiles of local libraries and brief biographies of some of the city's more prominent residents is certainly useful, but I'm not sure the hours of operation for the Ethel M Chocolate Factory are high on the list of information every new arrival needs to know. Still, most of what is presented in this book is at least interesting, even though Smith reveals a bit more political agenda in places than I might have liked. Also, while I fully expect John L. Smith to favor the Review-Journal, the paper he works for, I think it's more than a little disingenuous to not mention the Las Vegas Sun in the list of worthwhile information sources.
On the other hand, a lot of information I would expect to find in a book on this topic is strangely absent. Never once do the authors mention that a very large percentage of what most folks consider to be Las Vegas is actually outside the city limits (including all of Las Vegas Boulevard south of Sahara Ave.). Does it matter whether one lives inside the city limits or not? This question is never addressed. Neither do the authors talk about living in proximity to a number of fairly nasty fauna that are indigenous to the area.
There are even more questions I would have expect to have been addressed for which I don't know the answer. The authors mention that there are particular problems caused by Nevada residents' tendencies to underfund necessary government programs, yet they're sparse on details on how this actually affects residents. How long does it typically take to obtain, for example, a Nevada driver's license? Are there things that one can do to expedite this process and others?
Even though a lot of questions that I'd expect this book to address go unanswered, Moving to Las Vegas does provide a significant amount of useful information to its target readership. Moreover, while much of the information the book contains seems a little off topic, a large portion of it is still interesting enough to be worth reading. Therefore, while this isn't quite the book I would have hoped for, it's still worthwhile. It also reads much more quickly than its 300 page length might suggest.
While I wouldn't call Moving to Las Vegas a great book on the topic of its title, the Smiths do provide a significant amount of information that would be useful to new arrivals to the country's latest boom town. While I'm surprised at what would seem to me to be some obvious omissions, and while the book often reads more like a summary of recent history and a tourist guide than I might expect, it still contains a considerable amount of useful information that many might find valuable, and even more might find interesting. I give Moving to Las Vegas a lukewarm recommendation.
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