Warren, a plausible sociopath, was drawn to 1970s Arizona, whose Sun Belt allure and notoriously crooked officials made it a gold mine for unscrupulous developers. He devised a complex Ponzi scheme to fleece the unwary. But he needed an accountant to provide a veneer of rectitude. Enter Ed Lazar, seduced as innocently, perhaps, as hapless home buyers by Warren’s real estate shell game, until he knew too much to be allowed to walk away.
Or perhaps not. When irrefutable facts are few, the wise author resorts to atmosphere, and though he may be more a bereaved son than a hardnosed journalist, Zachary Lazar is no fool. From its moody title to its deliberately banal family snapshots foreshadowing doom, “Evening’s Empire’’ is an artful exercise in reportorial chiaroscuro.
WHY ARCHITECTURE MATTERS
By Paul Goldberger
Yale University, 304 pp., $26
“The purpose of this book,’’ writes Paul Goldberger, “is to explain what buildings do beyond keeping us out of the rain.’’ Goldberger, architecture critic of the New Yorker magazine, does not look at buildings technically or, despite the university press imprimatur, academically. His interest is in their interactions with people, in how they make us think and how they make us feel, whether elated or indifferent, protected or threatened. Buildings open up a conversation; they speak about the values of the individuals and the societies that made them.
The Gothic cathedral, says Goldberger, tells us something about medieval Europe, the classical balance and order of Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia something very different about America at its founding. Much modern architecture, whether innovative or derivative, attests to the reign of the automobile, while the deconstructed geometry of postmodern architecture is cropping up in places and cultures that have little in common but the computer, essential to its design, and the money to pay for it.
In prose as accessible and inviting as a well-designed building, Goldberger lucidly explains what he sees when he looks at an iconic structure, leading us to see more clearly as well.
