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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
