Recommended Reading List for This Year’s Duck Duck Shed

The Las Vegas Madam: The Escorts, the Clients, the Truth takes you inside the life of a call girl as she spirals into a world of glamour and secrets and expose.

When a scandalous news story splashed across mainstream media about an elite escort agency in Las Vegas, people were shocked to learn there was a tiny mastermind behind the company a small town girl from Oregon named Jami Rodman who went by the pseudonym Haley Heston. Meet the secret society of high-end escorts and the men who hire them.

Discover the highly lucrative business of sex as Rodman reveals the hidden websites and layers of complex networking to satisfy man’s endless desire for sex. Timed with the 2007 collapse, Vegas cultivated a new, unprecedented class of call girls… ones with brains, beauty and savvy. Together with her agency, they cleaned up the soiled reputation of prostitution in Las Vegas.

Design is everywhere. It’s visceral. It’s intellectual. It’s emotional. While we often discuss the aesthetics of design, we don’t always dig deeper into the ways design can overtly, or covertly, influence how we feel and act.

In How Design Makes Us Think, AIGA award-winning graphic designer Sean Adams walks us through the power of design to attract attention and convey meaning. Through hundreds of examples across design principles, from graphic design to industrial design to architecture, Adams illustrates how design can inspire, provoke, amuse, anger, or reassure us, or subtly or consciously influence our thoughts and behavior.

The book also delves into the sociological, psychological, and historical reasons for our responses to design, offering practitioners and clients alike a new appreciation of their responsibility to create design with the best intentions. How Design Makes Us Think is an essential read for designers, educators, advertisers, psychology enthusiasts, marketing professionals, and anyone who wants to understand how the design around us makes us think, feel, and do things.

In the history of Rock ‘n Roll, no performer ever defined a style like Elvis. From his rockabilly suits of the 1950s to the jeweled jumpsuits of the 1970s, the King’s on-stage fashion became as iconic as his music. Now, for the first time, the Graceland archives open their doors for this once-in-a-lifetime look at the stagewear of the King.

From the now-iconic gold lamé suit in the 1950s and the leather suit from the 1968 Comeback Special to the last jumpsuit Elvis wore onstage in Indianapolis, this comprehensive book contains more than 150 pieces of stagewear spanning Elvis’s entire career. Stunning jumpsuits, beautifully detailed capes, numerous belts, two-piece suits, studded boots, jewelry, and even chokers that were created for Elvis but never worn on stage are all featured in beautiful new photography created especially for this book. Also included are suits that until now have never been seen as their complete sets, including three Cisco Kid two-piece outfits worn in Las Vegas in 1971, and two of Elvis’s Dude Suits, worn in Las Vegas in 1972.

A compelling and exciting look at the remarkable tale of Las Vegas’ rise to the epicenter of magic. Featuring new interviews and photos, this stunning hardcover book is a must-read for any magician or fan of magic.

Written by Lance Rich, Neon Dreams: The Story of Las Vegas Magic gives you a front-row seat to the transformation of Las Vegas from a modest railroad stop town to the mecca of multi-million-dollar magical extravaganzas. This captivating story is filled with unexpected twists and turns that make it impossible to put down once you start.