Two Reviews of My Book “Venice in Las Vegas”

Here are excerpts from two reviews of my book, “Venice in Las Vegas: An American and European Auto-Socio-Biography,” published in academic journals.

[Shapiro’s] latest book, Venice in Las Vegas: An American and European Auto-Socio-Biography, 1960s to 1980s, takes up the ‘travelling genre’ of the auto-socio-biography to frame a philosophical dialogue between European history and American hypermodernity by comparing the actual city of Venice, Italy (the epitome of European culture and history), with its hyperreal recreation at the Venetian Resort on the Las Vegas Strip. In the process of this intercontinentalism, Shapiro delivers a witty, honest and compelling self-analysis of his own internal rifts. According to Shapiro, the pivotal problem of our society is the alienation of the individual, and alienation is to be understood here in Camus’ sense, as a deep feeling of estrangement from oneself, others and the world. In his auto-socio-biography, Shapiro sketches how he overcame his own alienation and how it is that writing specifically resolves the quest for meaning by opening the way to regaining time, in the footsteps of Marcel Proust, another homodiegetic author…

Shapiro proceeds by anchoring his memories alongside thinkers like Baudrillard and Camus; the book itself is dedicated to Auster, and Shapiro shares the latter’s clear, gripping and minimalist style…

Like a Deleuzean ‘chaodyssey (chao-errance)’ Shapiro’s autosocio-
biography narrates his ‘virtual state of rupture’1 by blending sociological, political, and philosophical analysis with deeply personal stories. Candid portrayals of his youth, subsequent jobs in New York, and participation in a 1977 student uprising in Bologna, Italy are interspersed with rich observations of developments in technology, politics, and media from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Shapiro begins by tracing his privileged yet unhappy adolescence on Long Island by drawing comparisons to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. He recounts his experience of skipping 2 years in school at the age of 7 and the repercussions of this psychological trauma on his life and education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Cornell University…

— Vanessa Anne-Cécile Freerks, University of Fort Hare, South Africa
Review in European Journal of Cultural Studies, October 2026:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13675494261491130

“Alan N. Shapiro came into adulthood like many children of the postwar era, during America’s actualization as the world’s preeminent superpower. Thus, in many ways, his narrative resembles a dual bildungsroman, his maturation parallelling America’s. Yet what makes Shapiro’s auto-socio-biography particularly compelling is his weaving of notable sociological insights into
his personal narrative, elucidating the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of the former to better contextualize the latter…

Affinities abound with Shapiro’s auto-socio-biography and other countercultural tomes such as On the Road and Growing Up Absurd…

Baudrillard looms the largest throughout the book, though many other authors, theorists, and philosophers (Orwell, Debord, Camus, to name a few) are brilliantly infused into his narrative. In this book, the influence of Baudrillard’s theories of duality, simulacra, and the virtual naturally follows from Shapiro’s previous work, in which he theorizes the effects of technology and his project of science fiction theory. But in Venice in Las Vegas, Shapiro further blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, theory and experience, adopting a ludic posture, propelling his auto-socio-biography…

His narrative skillfully dramatizes the choices one makes between formal and informal learning, theory and practice, and the importance of playing within these dualities.”

— Nolan Bazinet, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at the Université de Sherbrooke
Review in Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, August 2026:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10714413.2026.2715449