My memoir book “Venice in Las Vegas: An American and European Auto-Socio-Biography, 1960s to 1980s” has been published on October 20, 2025 in the Counterpoints Studies in Criticality series, edited by Shirley Steinberg, of the Peter Lang Publishing House.
See here:
https://www.peterlang.com/document/1560177#
As Donald Trump seeks to transform America, many people talk about wanting to leave the country. I left the USA several decades ago, yet I still love my homeland. I searched for dialog between Europe and America through the link between Venice and Las Vegas. In Vegas, Venice is simulated. You can ride in a gondola. Replicas of the St. Mark’s Bell Tower and the Rialto Bridge exist. Venice is the emblem of European history, culture, and art. I gambled in the Venice Lido casino and drank Italian wine in Vegas. Born into a Jewish family on Long Island, my life was changed by an IQ test that led to skipping two years in school – an event that impacted my education, psychology, and connection to the world around me. I rejected the life path laid out for me and rolled the dice instead. I traveled in Europe, worked strange jobs in New York City, and took part in a student uprising in Italy. My memories are intricately tied to the writers I engaged with: Baudrillard, Camus, Auster, and others.
Table of Contents
Foreword
The Beginning
1 When I Was Twenty
2 The Scene of the Crime
3 The Radical Left Late 1960s
4 High School
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6 Cornell University Arts and Sciences
7 First Year in France and Italy
8 Art Students Make Politics: the “Metropolitan Indians” in Italy
9 Back in America Only to Leave Again
10 Two Years in Bologna
11 Las Vegas in Venice
12 Sociology Graduate Student in New York City
13 Greenwood Mills Marketing Company
14 Wall Street Computer Programmer
15 Venice in Las Vegas
Epilogue
Notes
Excerpt from Chapter 1:
“I was twenty. I will let no one say it is the best time of life.”
This opening sentence of the French writer Paul Nizan’s travel memoir Aden Arabie, published in 1931, has always impressed me for its parallelism with what I lived. Or maybe it was the opposite. Perhaps it was the best time of my life, and I did not know it. I wanted more from life than was my fair share. What I lived, what I was put through, could have killed me. That is the story I will tell in these pages. But since I survived and “made lemonade” from the lemons, as the psychotherapeutic saying goes, it is also a story of the best of all possible worlds.
Excerpt from Chapter 2:
The pathway to the beach at the far west end of the property was the most enchanting site of my childhood. You passed through the gate of a metal fence that was often locked. You entered a wide arboretum strip with many species of trees and sculpted greenery vines overhead. It was filled with the sounds of birds and crickets as summer approached. There were plentiful honeysuckle flowers. This immersion in the sensorium of magnificent nature continued for many minutes as you neared the water. At the termination of the path, you arrived at high cliffs far above Long Island Sound. I ran down the steep slope of loose, moist sand in fearless joy, propelled forward at high speed by gravity, landing safely on the horizontal strand. When I later read J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, it was that cliff I pictured in my mind’s eye as the place where Holden Caulfield, in his fantasy, catches the children playing with abandon in the rye fields close to the edge where they, literally in the scenario, risk tumbling to injury or something worse, or, metaphorically, lose the innocence of childhood.
Excerpt from Chapter 3:
In the late 1960s, the Vietnam War raged. It divided America and generations. Everyone had to decide if they were for or against the War. My brother and I were against it. My parents were for it. They felt it was their patriotic duty to support the War. In 1964, in the United States, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley began a rebellion that spread to university campuses across America, igniting a political movement against the War.
Excerpt from Chapter 4:
April 22, 1970, the day before my fourteenth birthday, was the first Earth Day. I participated in my first political activity, attending environmental workshops and teach-ins at Herricks High School about air and water pollution, oil spills, and endangered species. We took long walks, planted trees, and did “clean-ups” of broad grass fields. Inspired by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, environmental reform became a political issue. Consciousness about the potential danger of Earth’s ecological devastation and protection of the natural ecology of humanity’s planetary habitat was beginning. Attention was starting to be paid to global warming, climate change, the destruction of the ozone layer, the melting of the polar ice caps, the demolition of forests, excessive oil drilling, and loss of biodiversity.
Excerpt from Chapter 5:
The number of African American students at MIT was extremely small. My second elective political science course in the third semester was “Black American Politics.” I was the only white student in the class. The brilliant Professor Lorenzo Morris taught the seminar. Morris was a young intellectual, only ten years older than me. He became America’s leading scholar of the history of black politics. It was a small group, and we had amazing discussions. Lorenzo talked eruditely about the ideas, social science, and political commitments of W.E.B. Du Bois. The following semester, I did another seminar with Lorenzo Morris called “Urban Politics.” Lorenzo also suggested that I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn. That landmark work gave me insights into the institutional contexts of scientific research and ignited my interest in the philosophy and history of science.