Word: nevadas
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...Nevada Senator Harry Reid's capitol office is decorated-incongruously, given his taciturn demeanor-with large portraits of two fabulously flamboyant Americans, Andrew Jackson and Mark Twain. The Jackson portrait is dynamic, wind whipped, but slightly obligatory. Old Hickory, the first President who was not an aristocrat, was the brawling founder of the modern Democratic Party, and Reid, newly elected Senate minority leader, is now the highest-ranking Democrat in Washington...
...Twain dominates the room, with his white suit, wild hair and mischievous eye. His is an unexpected, ironic presence in a powerful politician's office-Twain assumed that all politicians were felonious-and Reid's explanation that the pseudonym Mark Twain was born in Nevada because Samuel Langhorne Clemens took his first newspaper job at the Virginia City, Nev., Territorial Enterprise doesn't fully explain the place of honor...
...story is Twainian, a western desert tall tale, and his background is as brutal and hardscrabble as Jackson's. "I guess it's no secret that both my parents drank heavily," he finally says. "I didn't learn my family values in Searchlight," he adds, referring to the tiny Nevada mining town where his father committed suicide and his mother washed laundry for the local brothels...
...family to attend high school in Henderson, 40 miles away, and he later went to college with money chipped in by Henderson townsfolk. Once an amateur boxer, he worked nights as a Capitol Hill police officer to pay for law school at George Washington University. As chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission from 1977 to 1981, Reid, a devout Mormon, battled organized crime's control of Vegas casinos and contended with threats as well as a bomb placed in his wife's car that police defused...
...look far and wide to find bits of the picture that Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola haven't already colored in, and as a result the novel is a bit of a grab bag. We follow the later careers of consigliereTom Hagen, who becomes a politician in Nevada, and singer Johnny Fontane, who, like Frank Sinatra, "helped transform Las Vegas ... into the fastest growing city in the United States." We also see more of Michael's sad-sack brother Fredo Corleone, who turns out to be a self-hating bisexual, and--in case you cared--the late Sonny Corleone...