DEALS, DANGER, DESTINY

Businessman LaCasse, with co-writer Kindness, looks back on luxuries and tragedies with lots of philosophizing in this free-wheeling memoir.

LaCasse recaps episodes from his long work life, including a stint as a radio broadcaster in the British Virgin Islands, from which he was deported after he reported on corrupt land grabs by American gangsters. He also tells of his time as a warehouse worker at a U.S. Army depot, where he made fake shipments to Vietnam to ensnare black-market criminals who were selling American equipment to the Viet Cong. Much of the book covers LaCasse’s career as a Seattle yacht broker of luxury vessels. After selling his brokerage, LaCasse turned to academic pursuits, getting kicked out of several universities for arguing with professors before earning a doctorate in education from Northcentral University’s online program. The book switches gears in later chapters, which comprise a whimsical conversation between LaCasse and the spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas—with the devil occasionally chiming in—at a cafe in Paris, where they discuss his life, dualism, quantum mechanics, and various platonic soul mates that the author has met via his podcast, Tension. LaCasse’s narrative is a ramble of shaggy-dog anecdotes, most good-natured but some fraught, such as one about a time when he prevented a suicidal person from diving off a Seattle bridge. The author’s voice is colorful and acerbically funny when relating the antics of a rich man who “walks his wife down the ramp to see the astoundingly impressive mega yacht he just purchased, and she refuses to step on board. ‘It’s ugly,’ she says. Sam turns to me and says, ‘Sell it,’ and they walk back to their car.” But the book also has plangent passages of loss and remembrance, as when LaCasse recollects his son Jeff’s death following a car crash. The result is a lively and absorbing read.

A vivid portrait of a man’s life that’s by turns rollicking and soulful.