Children of Las Vegas

Over forty million people a year travel to Vegas, more than to Mecca. It is a global celebrity, an improbable oasis, a place offering bank-breaking fortunes and instant gratification, 24/7, with no moral debits. Award-winning writer Timothy OGrady lived in Vegas for two years. He finally began to understand it when he talked to people who had grown up there, the children of the card dealers and cocktail shakers, the jugglers and the dancers young people who had been bearing witness to this strange city all their lives. One had her student loans and credit card limits stolen by her father. Another fled a sequence of exploiters until she found herself living in the storm drains under the casinos. There is the boy whose father entered him into a drinking contest when he was eight, the casino owners son, the erudite contortionist turned stripper. Each tells their own tale. In Children of Las Vegas, OGrady renews his partnership with renowned photographer Steve Pyke. Through short essays, Pykes portraits and ten witness testimonies, he pierces the citys glittering faade to reveal the darker reality that lies beneath.