Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Starlight Hotel-Casino by William A. Douglass William D. Rowley The Starlight Hotel-Casino. By William A. Douglass (Hamilton (ON), Canada: Guernica Editions, 2023), 319 pp. For fans of historical novels The Starlight Hotel-Casino delivers a fast-moving and absorbing tale. Set in the context of Reno's troubled gaming industry of the 1990s, the narrative relates the trials and tribulations of the owners, managers, and workers struggling to survive in a city challenged by falling tourist numbers and failing gaming enterprises. Add in family conflicts over who should succeed an aging patriarch in a small gaming empire as well as dissolving marriages and new marriages to succeed the old ones, and voila, the extra spice and drama of personal relationship stories. The Starlight is William A. Douglass's first venture into the world of the novel. Otherwise, he is a widely published anthropological scholar of the Basque diaspora in the Americas. He is also a native Renoite with a distinguished academic career at the University of Nevada as well as being actively engaged in his family's longtime Reno hotel and casino businesses. Rarely do we find an individual with life experiences so firmly rooted in these disparate worlds, even in Nevada. Novels, some say, are by their very nature autobiographical. The case is obvious here. It is no secret that Douglass assisted in the recording of his father's oral history for the University of Nevada's Oral History Program (published in 1996 under the title Tap Dancing on Ice: The Life and Times of a Nevada Gaming Pioneer) with the authorship identified as "Jack Douglass, as told to William A. Douglass." Not surprisingly, a major theme in The Starlight Hotel-Casino addresses the dynamics of intergenerational conflict. Even the front cover of the book has been altered to make the I in CASINO look more like an O to read "HOTEL CASONO." Along with the subject of the gaming economy in Reno, including the family dynamics, this is a novel of circumstances. In the genre of novels about Reno, it supersedes the divorce novel that once dominated fictional writing about Reno – see Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr.'s Reno (1929) and others by this scion of great wealth, who had much experience in Reno divorce courts. In Starlight there are no irredeemable rogues lurking in the varied plot lines or virtuous heroes jousting with dark forces of evil as one might find in gaming novels about Las Vegas. The story is about people trying to get along and survive in a changing world as decades of successful gaming enterprises in Reno come to an end. One episode is an exception that involves a child kidnapping. The crime does not end well. In hindsight for this reader, it seems to be an obligatory add-on – perhaps to include the dark and sinister to compete with gangster themes inherent in so much of the literature about Las Vegas 400 miles to the south in this immense state. In a far less dramatic vein, the owners and managers of the Starlight Hotel-Casino struggle to save it from bankruptcy. By the 1990s, Indian gaming in California, Las Vegas's domination [End Page 52] of the gaming market, and local government jurisdictions authorizing legal gambling throughout the United States are all cutting into Reno's gaming market. Still, one of these threats offers opportunities. Experienced gaming managers can find lucrative contracts in private consulting with tribes interested in establishing their own new casinos authorized under the terms of Congress's Indian Gaming Act of 1988. All the while, Reno faced declining tourist numbers that meant belt tightening, bankruptcy, and reorganization, especially for smaller, often family-owned gaming enterprises that had long been an integral part of the Biggest Little City's gaming scene. Douglass makes a point of describing Reno's favored geographical location sitting astride the division between verdant California and the arid interior of the American West. On this score his work joins Walter Van Tilburg Clark's coming-of-age novel City of Trembling Leaves (1945) that celebrates the aesthetics of Reno's natural environment. Set against the background of mountainous scenery and amongst...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".