Meticulous but difficult to follow.
An exacting examination of the life and 1975 murder of the author’s father, Ed Lazar, an Arizona accountant killed just before testifying about the house-of-cards real-estate business he’d inadvertently helped orchestrate.
When novelist Lazar (Sway, 2006, etc.) was six, his father was shot five times in the stairwell of a parking garage, assassinated by Mafia hit men. “Several different profiles have emerged of Lazar—a ‘sheep,’ an aggressor, a devoted husband, a swinger,” a local journalist wrote at the time, “but no one seems sure which description fits the best.” For the next two decades, Ed Lazar was depicted as a con artist—the equivalent, in his son’s mind, of his being murdered twice. After it was revealed, in 1996, that the murder had been ordered by Lazar’s former business partner, Ned Warren Sr., the author undertook the process of reviewing the preceding events and shady dealings, drafting a portrait of a father he never really knew. “Whatever I write,” Lazar warns readers, “will have to be a kind of conjuration.” His book untangles how his father came to work as the bookkeeper for Warren, the “king of Arizona land fraud.” By reselling deeds for the same quarter-acre lots of an undeveloped subdivision, Warren, along with his partners, including the bribed state’s real-estate commissioner, swindled millions of dollars from thousands of investors. The cast of real-life characters is fascinating, but numerous enough to tax distractible readers. Instead of following a linear plot, the author—who, by his own account, lacks objectivity (“I knew I was not an objective judge. My emotions were carrying me from one conjecture to another”)—frequently switches time frames and interweaves real transcripts with imagined scenes. Fueled by an appealing masculine energy, the book is timely, considering the current real-estate climate, but it falls short of the great true-crime titles, handicapped by too many threads and a knotty structure that never pays off.
Meticulous but difficult to follow.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-03768-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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BOOK REVIEW
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PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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