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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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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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