Lee Evans Bio Long on Life, Short on Ideas

No one on earth knows more about how to make money in the home building business than Lee Evans.

After more than 50 years of studying, educating and consulting for builders, Evans, 85, has seen success and failure in a thousand forms. But you won't find much of that accumulated insight in From Happy Valley to the Mountain-top (Daniel Publishing Group, Boulder, Colo.). Evans' newly published autobiography has only one chapter on his consulting work and one on his seminars.

That's a shame because builders still desperately need the knowledge Evans hammered into his clients. However, this is the book Evans wanted to write, the story of his immensely varied life, not the book builders need. It's fascinating reading, tracing his rise from Depression-era horse wrangler to inclusion on this magazine's list of the 26 most influential people in the first 60 years of PB's coverage of the American housing industry (November 1996).

If you're one of the thousands of builders Evans (and his wife, Virginia) helped over the years, you'll enjoy this book. But we're still looking for the one we need. It might borrow the title of Evans' standing-room-only seminar at NAHB conventions past -- "If You Stay in This Business Long Enough, You'll Go Broke."