November 2008
ORLANDO MAGAZINE - City Scene
Book Report
Larger Than Life
A former Orlando Sentinel reporter tells how Lou Pearlman managed to hoodwink practically everyone—for a while, anyway.
By Jay Boyar
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The Hit Charade: Lou Pearlman, Boy Bands, and
the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in U.S. History
By Tyler Gray
Collins. 320 pages. $24.95
www.harpercollins.com
It isn’t easy for basically honest people to wrap their heads around the schemes of a flimflammer like Lou Pearlman, Orlando’s erstwhile boy-band Svengali who recently began serving a 25-year prison term.
The scale of Pearlman’s lies is so grand, the complexity of his crimes so extreme, that most of us can only marvel at the sort of mind capable of conceiving and maintaining them.
But in The Hit Charade, author Tyler Gray (formerly of the Orlando Sentinel and now a senior editor at Blender magazine in New York) is dogged in his pursuit of the facts of Mr. P’s wild ride.
Gray, who is billed as “the only journalist to speak with Pearlman while he was in jail” (in Orlando before his transfer to a federal prison), takes us from the ex-impresario’s childhood in Queens, New York, up through his heyday in Orlando as the force behind The Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC and other pop phenoms.
The author appears to have done his homework, although he is sometimes a bit too eager to share it with the reader. His new book occasionally bogs down in descriptions of the labyrinthine intricacies of Pearlman’s many and various swindles.
But Gray does have a hip, jaunty style, as well as an eye for the amusing detail.
He notes, for example, that Cohen & Siegel, a bogus auditing firm set up by Pearlman, was named for Las Vegas gangsters Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel. Gray also points out that when the 300-pound music mogul was on the lam, he registered at a hotel under the comical nom de scam of A. Incognito Johnson.
In retrospect, such details might indicate that Pearlman secretly wanted to be caught, but the overwhelming evidence suggests otherwise. For years, he snowed investors and banks, employees and partners, friends and family, the government and the media—including 20/20 and 60 Minutes II.
Lou Pearlman’s story is easily more entertaining than any song that’s come from his boy bands.
BOOKS IN BRIEF
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Selling the Sunshine State: A Celebration of Florida Tourism Advertising
By Tim Hollis. University Press of Florida.
352 pages. $34.95.
www.upf.com
Long before Disney, Universal and today’s other major players were dominating Florida tourism, the state was aggressively selling itself as a multifaceted fun-in-the-sun vacation spot. In this book—which author Tim Hollis calls “the most elaborate Florida vacation scrapbook ever assembled”—you’ll find amusingly antique images of hundreds of vintage Sunshine State advertising devices, from the expected brochures and postcards to such novelty items as coloring books, recipe collections and sugar packets. The book’s Grove Coast (East and Central Florida) section highlights such early tourist attractions as Midget City (a miniature landscape between Orlando and Sanford), Clermont’s Citrus Tower, Haines City’s Circus World and the Daytona area’s Bongoland (no, don’t ask).
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I See Your Name Everywhere: Leverage the Power of the
Media to Grow Your Fame, Wealth and Success
By Pam Lontos and Andrea Brunais.
Morgan James Publishing.
164 pages. $15.95.
www.morganjamespublishing.com
This savvy little book is a must-read for anyone who frequently deals with the news media, or would like to. Written by Pam Lontos, president of Orlando’s PR/PR public relations firm, and former journalist Andrea Brunais, it contains such sound, practical, nuts-and-bolts advice as “never ask a reporter to show you the story before it goes on the air or in print,” “before you contact the news media, make sure you have all the facts on hand” and “always put your text in the body of the e-mail” because “journalists almost never open the attachment.”
AUTHORS, AUTHORS!
If you’re an Orlando-area author with a new or recent book, send me a copy and I’ll try to include it in a future edition of Book Report. Send it to Jay Boyar, Orlando magazine, 801 N. Magnolia Avenue, Suite 201, Orlando, FL 32803. Please include your phone number and e-mail address, and tell me where you live in Central Florida. (If you’re having your publisher send me your book, please send me this information separately, either in a letter or in an e-mail to jay.boyar@orlandomagazine.com.) Sorry, but no self-published, technical, poetry or strictly academic books.
