Product Description
You talking to me? This title features previously unseen photographs from one of cinema's greatest movies. The Art Edition (copies 1-100) is limited to just 100 signed and numbered copies, each with the original pigment print 'Robert De Niro in his cab', "Taxi Driver", New York 1975. It's format is: 35.56 X 27.94 cm (14 X 11 in.) in a mat 36 X 28,5 cm (14,17 X 11.22 in.). It is signed by Steve Schapiro. ... Read more

Product Description
With the intensity of a Jacobean tragedy, Casino unfolds its tale of a love triangle between a gambler, his wife, and his henchman amid the glittering, festering Babylon of Las Vegas. The film makes daring use of voice-over and rapidly shifting points of view and time frame, leaving conventional film language far behind.
Amazon.com Review
The author of the best-selling Wiseguygives us this true and brilliantly-told story of love, marriage,adultery, murder, revenge, and how it led to the Mafia's finallylosing its stranglehold on the Las Vegas casinos. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (41)

Good book, not so great condition
I love the book, and know it is an older version.But the book was in very poor condition, with some kind of stuff all over every page.I guess I couldn't expect much more from a rare book.

Las Vegas tradition of greed and corruption
Nicholas Pileggi gives us a look into american business before modern Corporate America took over the sure money-maker of Gaming in Las Vegas, the biggest venue of this industry.Casino really has some juicy details about inner workings of government, gaming, and mob operations and how they work together to make money together. The details are juicy and accurate, or as accurate as they can be, because Pileggi uses actual court document, police reports, and interviews with the players themselves.What an intriguing mix of hard-tongue business negotians, domestic unrest, and cold-blooded murder.

Still a Thrilling Ride, Las Vegas Style!
The book has some writing problems like you can't tell who's speaking to you at the time. The book is written by a variety of different voices. I loved the movie, Casino. The book fills in a lot of background details of the real-life characters and the movie starring Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone. DeNiro plays the lead character, Frank Lefty Rosenthal. In the movie, he's Ace Rothstein. Pesci plays Tony Spilotero as Nick who will remind you of Goodfellas role. Stone plays Ginger rather than Geri.
I still find the book interesting especially about how thorough it is in regards to understanding the backgrounds of the mob, Las Vegas, Chicago, and the neighborhoods of Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal and Tony Spilotero's character. I always watching the movie but I like watching it from the beginning. I can't stand watching it in the middle but Scorsese did an excellent job in maintaining the voices that inspired the movie.

Muddy Mob Story Lacks Punch
For years, Lefty Rosenthal and Tony Spilotro were two of Las Vegas's heaviest hitters, Chicago boys who moved West to take advantage of easy money and short odds. Lefty was bright and worked through the system, however corrupt. Tony was a bully who shook things up while looking out for himself.

The two characters are the center of Nicholas Pileggi's "Casino", a true-crime account of Vegas during the 1970s and 1980s, when organized crime used the gambling mecca as its own private money tree.

Published in 1995 as a tie-in to the Martin Scorsese movie, "Casino" the book is slightly different in that it offers the real story rather than the fictionalized version seen in the film. The characters don't pop off the page the way they do off the screen, but they are better grounded by reality.

As with his earlier book "Wise Guy" (made into another Scorsese movie, "Goodfellas"), Pileggi works with a lot of first-hand testimony. He captures a sense of really hearing these guys as you read the pages, tuning into their hard world. But a couple of serious problems soon present themselves.

The first is that Pileggi doesn't have the same kind of story he did with "Wise Guy". Instead of the record Lufthansa airport heist memorably depicted there, you get a long story about how Joe got mad when someone failed to show Gregory Peck's secretary a good-enough time in Vegas. Pileggi offers this as an example of the scut work that made Joe restless and difficult within the Mob, but it's also the kind of smallball that makes "Casino" feel less vital over time. People coming to this after seeing the movie are going to be surprised by the relative lack of violence here. How many times can you read about crimes that largely occurred inside balance books?

The second issue is Pileggi's way of relying almost exclusively on first-hand testimony, especially from Rosenthal. Lefty comes across as a charmer, but also by his own account too removed from the illegal aspect of the story. That may be Rosenthal's own spin; the guy who was Rosenthal's nominal boss calls him a liar and psychopath who was at the center of the mob skims. Rosenthal denies any knowledge of skims.

This flies straight in the face of the portrait Pileggi paints, of Lefty being so detail obsessed he counts blueberries in the muffins his casino restaurants serve. Yet Pileggi leaves Rosenthal's denial unchallenged in his minimal narration. In fact, he doesn't provide much textual background for anything in "Casino", including how important Rosenthal and Spilotro ultimately were to the Mob in Vegas, just that Rosenthal was good at gambling while Spilotro knocked over some jewelry stores.

Pileggi also gets a lot of mileage out of how Joe two-timed Lefty with Lefty's gorgeous gold-digger wife. Geri Rosenthal's probably the most interesting character, a force of will who demands everything she can from life. She isn't sympathetic, but neither is anyone else in this one-note book. That kind of grates after a while.

you've seen the movie, now read the book
seriously, read the book. if you liked casino but wanted a more just the facts account of the story, the book delivers. the book offers more points of views than the movie did and additional information to flesh out events. ... Read more