Theme park

With a nature sweeter than this ill treatment merits, Gun manages to do the right thing, while taking the reader along for a splendid themepark ride.

Set to rise on the site where the Sands now stands is Sheldon Adelson's $2 billion Venetian, the latest in the wave of themepark casinos that began with the MGM Grand and the Luxor and now includes New York, New York, with its one-third-scale replicas of the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty crisscrossed by a giant Coney Island roller coaster.

Anthropologist Monique Skidmore risked arrest to visit some of the dismal peri-urban townships – so-called “New Fields” – outside Rangoon where the military dictatorship forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of urbanites whose former slums stood in the way of the tourist-themepark rebuilding of the city center. […] As the Third World middle classes increasingly bunker themselves in their suburban themeparks and electrified “security villages,” they lose moral and cultural insight into the urban badlands they have left behind.