NEVADA: True Tales From the Neon Wilderness...

NEVADA: True Tales From the Neon Wilderness by Jim Sloan (University of Utah Press: $12.95; 209, paperback original). Unlike many Western writers, Sloan ignores the desert environment for the gamblers, con artists and losers Nevada attracts. In deadpan prose, he recounts the trials of brothel-owner Joe Conforte and the tribulations of police officer Glen Henderson, and finds curious parallels in the careers of a quack healer who pushed the industrial solvent DMSO and a mechanical wizard who rigged slot machines to pay off. Sloan vividly portrays a curious state--and state of mind: “Lives are exaggerated here, wrung out and stretched thin by broken hope, or clenched tight and made sudden and quick, like a rifle shot into the empty night sky.”