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Making Monte Carlo - A History of Speculation and Spectacle

English · Paperback

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Zusatztext “Braude’s deftly written Making Monte Carlo is social and cultural history at its best. Above all, it is an object lesson in the modern art of promotion. Contrary to Sam Spade, Braude demonstrates that nothing quite pays off like the stuff that dreams are made of.” Informationen zum Autor Mark Braude Klappentext “A brisk historical tour of the marketing and selling of the small principality of Monaco and its famous city…A well-researched, dramatic rags-to-riches urban tale” ( Kirkus Reviews ) of Monte Carlo’s rise from small principality to prosperous resort town of the 1920s.Monte Carlo has long been known as a dazzling playground for the rich and famous. The “vivid, entertaining” ( The Wall Street Journal ) Making Monte Carlo traces a narrative history of the world’s first modern casino-resort, from the legalization of gambling in Monaco in 1855—passed as a desperate bid to stave off bankruptcy—through the resort’s improbable emergence as a glamorous gambling destination of to its decline in the wake of WWI and its subsequent reinvention in the 1920s until the inaugural Monaco Grand Prix in 1929, on the eve of the Wall Street crash that would largely spell the end of the freewheeling era. Along the way, we encounter a colorful cast of characters, including Francois Blanc (a professional gambler and cheat and eventual founder of Monte Carlo); Basil Zaharoff (notorious munitions dealer and probable secret owner of the casino for some years in the 1920s); Elsa Maxwell (hired as the casino’s publicist in the late 1920s); Réné Léon (a visionary Jewish businessman with murky origins); Serge Diaghilev, Jean Cocteau, Coco Chanel, Pablo Picasso, and other satellite members of the Ballet Russes dance company; as well as Gerald and Sara Murphy and other American expats, such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. “An engrossing examination of how politics, personality, and publicity coalesced to transform a sleepy village into a luxurious playground populated with casinos and beautiful people” ( Publishers Weekly ), Making Monte Carlo is a classic rags-to-riches tale set in the most scenic of European settings. Leseprobe Making Monte Carlo PREFACE MONTE CARLO STORIES It came vividly to Selden on the Casino steps that Monte Carlo had, more than any other place he knew, the gift of accommodating itself to each man’s humour. —Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth IN 1863 WORK BEGAN on a new town at the eastern edge of the tiny principality of Monaco. By the close of the next decade the Monte Carlo casino-resort had emerged as the world’s gambling playground of choice. In the same era, the color poster gained favor as a form of mass advertising. Posters could be printed cheaply and distributed widely, and they came out as glossy and disposable as the attractions they sold. Designed to grab the attentions of passersby hurrying through crowded urban spaces, they seduced by offering glimpses into the forbidden. Posters advertising Monte Carlo promised a town without shadows, where sun-kissed lives played out on clay courts and under canvas sails. They featured fast men and fast women doing fast things in fast machines. Only rarely did the posters show the casino that funded their production. People critiqued the new resort and its preferred advertising medium in similar terms. Both were deemed garish and vulgar, overly sexualized and superficial. Both pandered to the vain, venal, and selfish. Both brazenly put culture in the service of commerce. The first visitors to the gambling town found it looked nothing like the one in the posters. Accustomed as they were to wax museums and phantasmagorias and other pleasant lies of the age, they wouldn’t ...

Product details

Authors Mark Braude
Publisher Simon & Schuster USA
 
Languages English
Product format Paperback
Released 30.04.2017
 
EAN 9781476709703
ISBN 978-1-4767-0970-3
No. of pages 304
Subjects Humanities, art, music > History > General, dictionaries
Travel > Travelogues, traveller's tales

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