Winner Takes All

Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, and the Race to Own Las Vegas

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By Christina Binkley

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$21.99

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$28.99 CAD

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Sin City. Bright lights, high stakes, and no sleep. Home to some of the world’s grandest, flashiest, and most lucrative casino resorts, Las Vegas, with its multitude of attractions, draws some forty million tourists from around the world every year. But Vegas hasn’t always been booming at the level it is today. This newest influx is largely a result of three competing business moguls. Meet Kirk Kerkorian, Steve Wynn, and Dr. Gary Loveman, men who couldn’t be more different from one another, yet share the same tunnel-vision determination to conquer the city that feeds the world’s fantasies. No longer just a go-to city for gambling, as a result of Kerkorian, Wynn, and Loveman working to reach the top–and to top one another–Las Vegas is now home to restaurants run by some of the world’s top chefs, some of Hollywood’s biggest stars headlining their own venues, galleries featuring some of the world’s most valuable art, and meta-resorts boasting the largest and most expansive casinos, spas, and more. Having had personal access to these men, Wall Street Journal reporter Christina Binkley gives us a never-before-seen, up-close look at the trio of tycoons whose high-stakes gambles have made Sin City soar. Sharp, insightful, and revealing, this is the gripping story of how billions of dollars and the unparalleled drive for power made the personal visions of three moguls evolve from dreams to larger-than-life reality.

Genre:

  • "The author has a novelist's instinct for character development and taut, suspenseful storytelling, infusing the subject with all of the drama, verve and what-happens-next imperative of a classic Scorsese epic."
    Kirkus Reviews
  • "Binkley vividly conveys the repulsiveness of the scene, but as with train wrecks, you just can't stop looking. Or reading."
    The Washington Post
  • "You won't want to put down her tale of how Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, and Steve Wynn got their start and made their fortunes in Sin City."
    CNN Money
  • "Binkley offers plenty of nuggets mined from her years on the beat, producing a full, flashy tale of powerful men and their pride, vanity, envy, greed-and all the other cardinal no-no's that earned Vegas the name Sin City."
    Publishers Weekly
  • "The odds are good this will be quite a bestseller. It's a great drama on the greatest stage Wynn, Kerkorian, and Loveman represent three opposing business personalities, three styles of achieving success. On the Vegas strip, they're pitted against each other like gladiators, and we've got front row seats. Kapow!"
    Po Bronson, author of What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question
  • "I haven't put this book down and for good reason. If you're curious about the people, ahem, men, who rule Las Vegas, Winner Takes All will introduce you to the world of flashy, egomaniacal business moguls. Christina Binkley a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist leads the troops into Las Vegas and unearths Steve Wynn, the tycoon behind such hotels as The Wynn and Encore hotels, amongst others. You'll be captivated by it."
    Women.com
  • "A must-read!"
    Vital Vegas podcast

On Sale
Mar 10, 2009
Page Count
320 pages
Publisher
Hachette Books
ISBN-13
9781401309763

Christina Binkley

About the Author

Christina Binkley is an award-winning journalist who writes and chats about the business of culture. At the Wall Street Journal for twenty-three years, she covered fashion, gambling, and other topics that familiarized her with larger-than-life personalities.

Binkley contributes to WSJ Magazine, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and DesignLA. She appears periodically on venues such as CNN and National Public Radio. A graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Binkley was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of 9/11. She was awarded the Jesse Laventhol Prize for Deadline News Reporting by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Binkley lives in the hills of Los Angeles with her husband and two teens, with cats, a dog, a passel of chickens, and a dead-on view of the Hollywood sign.

Learn more about this author