Comments About “Venice in Las Vegas”

Here I will post comments about “Venice in Las Vegas” as they come in.

“The authenticity of the ’60s counterculture meets the Disneyfied and digitalised world of hypermodernity as lived by a young American (born in 1956).  Shapiro knows that telling this story as autobiography is an art, and not a minor one.  His is candid,  witty, varied, and written as an adventure across two continents.  It informs, entertains, and educates as the experience did for Shapiro. A delight to read. An amazing story. He has written a great autobio, many congrats to him.”

– Mike Gane, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Loughborough University

“I am at a loss for words. It’s a work of art. The photos, especially yours, are so gorgeous. There is a joy that stems from this ‘personal’ book. I mean the ‘pleasure of text’ for us, the readers, with whom you’ve decided to share the best part of your life. In your autobiography, I can clearly trace the transitional history of Western modernity from the postwar to the contemporary era. There is a pure ‘evidence’ of so-called ‘intellectual history’. I forecast that soon it will be part of the university curriculum in Cultural Studies, with a distinguished position in the international literature. Both covers look gorgeous. This is a cultural theory ‘textbook’ using the technique of autobiography as its special narrative vehicle.”

— Spiros Makris, Professor of Political Theory, Department of International and European Studies, University of Macedonia

“Richly detailed, Alan Shapiro’s Venice in Las Vegas is the story of the making of an American expatriate. Shapiro’s account of his experience as a young man in the summer of 1977 in Bologna, Italy is particularly vivid, and, to my mind, the climactic section of the book. Among his citations of major 20th- and 21st-century theorists, Shapiro cites Albert Camus’ observation that publication is a risk in favor of the author’s values. Venice in Las Vegas is a publication to that end.”

— Arnold Krupat, Emeritus Professor of Literature, Sarah Lawrence College

“Alan N. Shapiro writes and thinks like no one else. His essays and books have opened my eyes to the connections between the algorithmic, totalitarian, capitalist, bureaucratic, hyperreal, fascist, and virtual developments in Western society. His science fiction-based approach offers a lens on the world that not only helps to understand the bewildering phase we find ourselves in, but also helps us find ways to move forward.

Reading his life story is engaging, but it is also much more than a personal memoir, with portals between the personal and the political, between experience and idea, between biography and science fiction, between Venice and Las Vegas. Like many people who are ahead of their time and enigmatic thinkers, Shapiro did not have a straightforward path. ‘Venice in Las Vegas’ begins with the entertaining coming-of-age adventures of a boy burdened with the expectations that come with having an extremely high IQ (and who is mainly concerned with getting a girl to attend his bar mitzvah) and slowly develops into the sharp philosophical and political observations of a young man wandering through Europe and various simulations of Europe, gambling and writing and working and falling in love, as he tries to find where he can claim a place in this world. Venice in Las Vegas is a vivid picture of its time, a playful and intelligent mosaic of family, personal, philosophical, and political questions.”

— Bette Adriaanse, novelist, author of the book What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, a collaboration with Brian Eno

“I first met Alan in July 2004 at the conference on Jean Baudrillard and the Arts at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe. Baudrillard himself was in attendance and appreciated Alan’s research, which connected Baudrillard’s philosophy with quantum physics.

I am familiar with Alan’s work from his many essay contributions to the academic journals International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (IJBS) and Baudrillard Now. In our discussions, Alan and I discovered our shared high estimation of the Situationists and their concept of the “integrated spectacle” for illuminating the contemporary situation of post-truth and the crisis of democracy.

Alan’s recent book “Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction” argues for the close mutual enrichment between the study of science fiction narratives and media theory, and thus provides an original take on digital culture.

In ‘Venice in Las Vegas,’ I like the way Alan links many incidents of the cultural, political, media, and technological history of the 1960s to 1980s by interweaving his personal experiences with the spirit of the times.  I also went to high school on Long Island and was fascinated by how well he recalled how his experience intersected with the culture of the time. The book is an important contribution to the emerging genre of auto-socio-biography.”

– Douglas Kellner, Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Education, Gender Studies, and Germanic Languages, UCLA