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S'està carregant… After Visiting Friends (edició 2013)de Michael Hainey
Informació de l'obraAfter Visiting Friends: A Son's Story de Michael Hainey
Cap S'està carregant…
Apunta't a LibraryThing per saber si aquest llibre et pot agradar. No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. The author barely knew his father. Bob Hainey, a copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun Times, died alone on a street, when Michael was six years old. He died of an apparent heart attack but there were suspicious signs that there was more to his death. Michael became a journalist himself and as he got older he decided to start digging into the story. He soon discovered a lot more buried family secrets, than he ever expected, along with an unbending code of silence among Bob’s reporter cronies, even decades later. This was a very solid memoir, filled with a lot of Chicago lore and history, centered mainly around the 1960s. Recommended. ( ) This is a beautifully written memoir about a son’s quest to find out what happened the night his father died. I couldn’t put the book down and read it from start to finish in one sitting. I was hooked by the mystery but I loved the stories of the old newspapermen, of growing up in Chicago, of the author's meetings with his father's colleagues and his difficulty in establishing an adult relationship with his mother. Nicely written story. This is a memoir of a journalist who began in his late 30's to investigate the circumstances of his journalist father's death at 35 when the author was 6 years old. The family myth or story surrounding his death was unclear, had holes and rarely discussed ... never in full. The author is Deputy Editor of GQ and is a superb writer. The story he has crafted is one of perseverance, courage and intensity. The writing is compelling. Read this book if you are brave. Harry Truman said, "They say I give 'em Hell, but that's wrong. I give 'em the truth, and they think it's Hell." What's it like to lose a parent at age 6? Michael Hainey sorts out what to trust from his memory and from what others tell him about the death of his father. Bob Hainey's Chicago Sun-Times copy desk is a generation removed from mine, and the son shows the expanse of that generation gap. But his search is entirely relatable to those who try to understand the departed: Starting as self-actualization, the pursuit draws the family closer. In this case it's also a fitting tribute to a newspaperman from the place and time that spawned a journalistic aphorism, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." The author seems to take the advice literally. Michael Hainey’s father, a “newspaperman”, died when he was only 35, and Michael only 6. As an adult, Michael took a look at the obituaries, but they didn’t really “line up”. There was something odd, and he wanted to find out how his father died. He and his family (mother and brother) had only been told he’d died on the street, after visiting friends. It was ok. It was a somewhat interesting search for the author to find out what had happened, but I didn’t like the writing style. He wrote in very short choppy non-sentences (well, some were sentences!). It also jumped around in time quite a bit, maybe more in the first half (that, or I got used to it and didn’t notice as much in the second half). The short sentences and short chapters made it quick to read.
The book’s frustrating circuitousness is offset by Mr. Hainey’s efforts to touch on a story bigger than his own and explain what the clichéd corruption of “the Chicago Way” meant to the news. He describes how Bob Hainey died at a time of irrevocable change, when old-time newsmen were fast becoming dinosaurs and violence surrounding the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention began to break up the beautiful friendship between reporters and the police. PremisDistincions
"A decade in the writing, the haunting story of a son's quest to understand the mystery of his father's death--a universal memoir about the secrets families keep and the role they play in making us who we are.Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family's back door one morning with the tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael's father, was found alone near his car on Chicago's North Side, dead, of an apparent heart attack. Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright and shining star in the competitive, hard-living world of newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone, leaving behind a young widow, two sons, a fractured family--and questions surrounding the mysterious nature of his death that would obsess Michael throughout adolescence and long into adulthood. Finally, roughly his father's age when he died, and a seasoned reporter himself, Michael set out to learn what happened that night. Died "after visiting friends," the obituaries said. But the details beyond that were inconsistent. What friends? Where? At the heart of his quest is Michael's all-too-silent, opaque mother, a woman of great courage and tenacity--and a steely determination not to look back. Prodding and cajoling his relatives, and working through a network of his father's buddies who abide by an honor code of silence and secrecy, Michael sees beyond the long-held myths and ultimately reconciles the father he'd imagined with the one he comes to know--and in the journey discovers new truths about his mother. A stirring portrait of a family and its legacy of secrets, After Visiting Friends is the story of a son who goes in search of the truth and finds not only his father, but a rare window into a world of men and newspapers and fierce loyalties that no longer exists"-- No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)070.92Information Journalism And Publishing Journalism And Publishing Biography And History BiographiesLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
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