A compellingly readable story about a con artist who “epitomized the duality of the American Dream.”
A chronicle of consumer electronics and corruption in the second half of the 20th century.
Investigative journalist Weiss reveals the mechanics of the corrupt retail empire of “Crazy Eddie” Antar (1947-2016). Eddie grew up in New York City’s Syrian Jewish community and dropped out of school at 15. He worked short stints in tourist traps before moving into electronics sales, where he made profits despite rock-bottom prices through acquiring his wares wholesale and skimming the sales tax from purchases, socking the unreported cash away in various hiding places, a process “known among Syrians” as nehkdi. Eddie christened the first Crazy Eddie store in 1973, and by the mid-1970s, he was establishing himself as the economic head of the family, which displeased his father, Sam M. Antar. As the business grew, bolstered by shrill and memorable marketing (“HIS PRICES ARE INSANE!”), so did the scale of the family corruption. In 1979, Sam “Sammy” E. Antar, Eddie’s cousin and the family lawyer, got his “Golden Idea”: They should take the company public and gradually dial back the amount of nehkdi to inflate the appearance of their profits. The scheme was working, drawing praise for the company, but behind the scenes, it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the facade of a highly successful, aboveboard operation—and, at its height, no one benefitted from the fraud more than Eddie. The story involves a massive cast of characters, from generations of the Antar family to Eddie’s scorned first wife, Deborah Rosen, and a slew of federal agents. Weiss paints an intricate portrait of greed, aspiration, and complicated family ties bolstered by recollections from Sammy, whose eventual cooperation helped secure convictions for Eddie and other Antar associates. The scheme can feel almost nostalgic following more recent financial scandals and the collapse of physical retail, but Weiss also emphasizes its very real consequences: Eddie “wasn’t hated, but he hurt people.”
A compellingly readable story about a con artist who “epitomized the duality of the American Dream.”Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-306-92455-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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A thimbleful of fresh content lies buried in tales familiar and often told.
Beatlemania meets autopsy in the latest product from the Patterson factory.
The authors take more than half the book to reach John Lennon’s final days, which passed 40 years ago—an anniversary that, one presumes, provides the occasion for it. The narrative opens with killer Mark David Chapman talking to himself: “It’s like I’m invisible.” And how do we know that Chapman thought such a thing? Well, the authors aver, they’re reconstructing the voices in his head and other conversations “based on available third-party sources and interviews.” It’s a dubious exercise, and it doesn’t get better with noir-ish formulas (“His mind is a dangerous neighborhood”) and clunky novelistic stretches (“John Lennon wakes up, reaches for his eyeglasses. At first the day seems like any other until he realizes it’s a special one….He picks up the kitchen phone to greet his old songwriting partner, who’s called to wish him all the best for the record launch”). In the first half of the book, Patterson and company reheat the Beatles’ origin story and its many well-worn tropes, all of which fans already know in detail. Allowing for the internal monologue, things improve somewhat once the narrative approaches Chapman’s deranged act—300-odd pages in, leaving about 50 pages for a swift-moving account of the murder and its aftermath, which ends with Chapman in a maximum-security cell where “he will be protected from the ugliness of the outside world….The cell door slides shut and locks. Mark David Chapman smiles. I’m home.” To their credit, the authors at least don’t blame Lennon’s “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” for egging on the violence that killed him, but this book pales in comparison to Kenneth Womack’s John Lennon 1980 and Philip Norman’s John Lennon: The Life, among many other tomes on the Fab Four.
A thimbleful of fresh content lies buried in tales familiar and often told.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-42906-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2021
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...
A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.
In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85782-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999
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