referencebooks

Gambling in America: An Encyclopedia of History, Issues, and Society

By William N. Thompson

Published by ABC-CLIO, 2001.

This is a hardbound, 7" by 10" book of 509 pages including the index and appendices, plus preferatory material that includes a chronology of gambling events and an introduction.

This is truly what the title says it is: an encyclopedia of gambling in the Western Hemisphere (but mainly North America).

Here is the full list of headings in the "S" sequence, with the lengths of the articles given in parentheses:

• St. Kitts-Nevis (short paragraph)
  
• St. Martin (two paragraphs)
  
• St. Vincent (short paragraph)
  
• Saskatchewan Gaming Corporation (one page plus a photograph)
  
• Sawyer, Grant (2.75 pages)
  
• Sex and Gambling in Nevada (3.5 pages plus two photographs)
  
• Siegel, Benjamin (1.5 pages plus two photographs)
  
• Slot Machines and Machine Gambling (7 pages plus a picture)
  
• South Carolina (1.5 pages)
  
• South Dakota (half a page plus two photos)
  
• Sports Betting (12 pages w/ a couple of pictures)
  
• The Stock Market (3.3 pages)
  
• Suriname (3/4 of a page)
  

The article on slot machines has the following subheadings, which give an idea of the tone of the book:

• A Personal Story
  
• The Value of the Machines
  
• The History of Slot Machines
  
• The Era of Bally, IGT, and Their Competitors
  
• Characteristics of Machine Gambling
  

The appendices include a section containing brief articles about gambling, an annotated list of major court cases setting legal precedents, a glossary of gambling terminology, an annotated bibliography, an unannotated bibliography, and finally an index.

The prose of the encyclopedia is light and factual.

This book is impressive considering that it's mainly the work of one person. It is a useful resource for facts about gambling in this part of the world.

Atlas of Crime: Mapping the Criminal Landscape

Edited by Linda S. Turnbull, Elaine Hallisey Hendrix and Borden D. Dent

Published by Oryx Press, 2000.

This is a 9" X 11" hardbound book of 270 pages, including the index. There are about 20 pages of front matter, including a list of contributors, preface, acknowledgments, and an article on the cartography of the book.

The main type of information in this book is rates of different types of crime by geography. There are eight chapters, mainly having to do with a major type of crime. The chapters are as follows:

1. Geographic history of crime
2. Crimes of personal violence
3. Crimes against property
4. Family violence
5. Organized and entrepreneurial crimes
6. "Film at 11" crimes
7. Mental mapping
8. Criminal justice

Some of the information is more specific than data on crime reports. For example, there are maps of the concentration of auto theft chop shop locations, maps of urban street gangs and drug trafficking, distance from the victim's home by type of crime, correlations between robbery and demographics within Manhattan, maps of the activity of hate groups, maps of maritime piracy, maps of global prostitution, and spacial analysis of police killed in the line of duty.

The scope of the atlas is global, but most maps are regional and local, and not to any one specific locale, thus making the book more useful for generating insights about crime and geography than as a reference for a broad range of desired facts about geography and crime, though it does function in the latter mode to an extent. For example, there maps of Georgia correlating the white population, median incomes and domestic violence. These are useful if someone needs to know about Georgia but more useful if someone wants to know about the relationship between race, income and domestic violence. (This data comes from Georgia State Government sources rather than national sources, though in many cases, the citation of statistical sources can lead the reader to further useful information.)

The atlas isn't simply a collection of maps; each topic also has a substantial discussion, typically taking up more space than the maps and charts themselves.

The section on "mental mapping" is an unusual feature of this atlas. It aims to look at people's mental images of their environments, particularly those of criminals. Figures in this section include actual maps drawn by criminals showing the routes between crime locations in a crime spree, the path taken outrunning police, and a burglar's territorial boundaries. Also included in this section are maps of detective fiction and maps by neighborhood residents showing which areas they felt to be dangerous: "cognitive maps of fear."