The Los Angeles Times is blogging Western books in its Reading L.A. series, and the current selection, 1986's Cadillac Desert, says a lot about the development of Las Vegas, too:

Published in 1986 and turned into a four-part PBS documentary series in 1997, "Cadillac Desert" focuses in the main on the great, often disastrous efforts the United States has taken to support massive irrigation projects in the driest sections of the West. (The book has arguably been as important to debates over water policy as Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" had been to those about pesticides a generation earlier.)