After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey

One morning, when Michael Hainey was six years old, he learned that his father, Robert Hainey, an assistant copy desk chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, sometime during the night had died from a heart attack. For some reason, Michael felt that the story about how his father had died did not add up, and during work on a high school term paper – when he had to visit the main library in downtown Chicago – he looked up his father’s obituaries.
And behold: they did not add up.

Chicago Today claimed that the newspaperman had died “as he walked” in the 3900 block of North Pine Grove after he had “just left the home of a friend.” But in the Chicago Daily News it was reported that Robert Hainey had died “while visiting friends.” Furthermore, Michael learned that his father had not died from a heart attack but from a stroke, and that he had been taken to a hospital on the city’s North Side, “Not exactly the closest hospital for two cops to take a man they find lying on the streets downtown.” The time of death was also curious: 5.07 a.m. Which meant that Michael’s uncle, a newspaperman also, was at the Hainey house less than two hours after his younger brother’s death. And why was it his uncle who broke the news anyway? So what was going on here?

After Visiting Friends is “a son’s story” about the shadow cast by the father’s last night and death. But the book is larger than that. It is an investigation of a family and of times gone by, and it is a report on journalism then and now.
Like so many trades, journalism has its own code of honor, and this code turns out to be a major obstacle when Michael Hainey tries to understand what happened that April night in 1970. Journalists, who claim to constantly strive to reveal the truth, conceal it with the words, I don’t know anything about that night.

But the information is still out there and others want to help, and one of them tells the writer: “you will defeat your enemy with the one weapon that you have inside you that he cannot touch and that he trembles before – truth.”
Does this sound mysterious? If so, it’s not surprising. For After Visiting Friends is – in addition to everything else it is – a real life mystery.”

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy

Robert Kennedy has been shot in Los Angeles, California, and Albany, New York, is about to enter a long night of arson, mayhem, and violence.

In the midst of this is the journalist Daniel Quinn who before the night is over will have filed news stories that will provoke and irritate his employer. Quinn has become a newspaper man as he wants to be a witness, and he “has a strong impulse to salvage history, which is so fragile, so prismatic, so easily twisted, so often lost and forgotten.”

Throughout the eventful and dangerous night Quinn encounters a long row of charismatic Albany citizens: alcoholics, criminals, bums, hacks, and activists who are so well portrayed that they could all be heroes of the tale. And William Kennedy makes this possible by not being judgmental and by not insisting that everyone has to be in a certain way – he shows humans in all their contradictory glory – and nobody, not even the hero, knows who will play the role of the hero before there is a need for one.

Roughly ten years before these events of 1968, Quinn has been in Cuba and witnessed another kind of violent turmoil as Fidel Castro and his soldiers revolt against the bloody oppression of the Batista regime. Like so many citizens of Albany, numerous Cubans yearn for change, but change may not always come in the desired shape. Castro will indeed grasp power in Cuba, but then the new government will feel the need to protect the revolution and before soon the country will – again – be governed by the few. Great upheavals of historic significance come and go. What William Kennedy does so exceptionally well is to show how humans respond and adjust to situations that may not be their choice.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Tabloid City by Pete Hamill

It’s Pete Hamill at his best … no one captures the sights and sounds of New York, the city that never sleeps, as well as Hamill. It will take a little patience to tie together all the threads of this story. He introduces you to so many characters that it will take you a little time to start to see how the characters will all play a role in this evolving tale. But in a short time, I promise you, it will all come together. Basically it is a murder mystery with a large cast of personalities that will all play a role in the story.

Some of the main characters are Sam Briscoe, editor of the World newspaper, fighting to save his beloved paper from the digital age.

There is socialite Cynthia Harding, fundraising for her beloved NY libraries. There is Mary Lou Watson, Cynthia’s secretary, who is married to Ali Watson, NYPD and attached to the Anti-Terrorist Unit.  And there is Malik Watson … Ali and Mary Lou’s son who has deserted the family to become a radical Muslim.  And these are only some of the characters you will meet and start to care for.  There is also Bobby Fonseca, who is just making his ‘bones’ as a reporter for the World. There are no chapters … the story is divided into day and night and the action swings back and forth from character to character.  After you have a feel for the characters, you will see how their paths cross once the bodies of Cynthia Harding and her secretary, Mary Lou Watson are discovered. Hamill’s story may well prove to you that in this world we live in, there really is only 6 degrees of separation.

One thing I can promise is that once you are caught up in this tale of intrigue and yet, the normalcy of everyday existence, you won’t put it down until you have finished it.  Pete Hamill does it again.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

I have read more books than I would like centered on the disappearance of a woman. Several recent titles that leap to mind are The Fates Will Find Their Way, In Search of the Rose Notes, The False Friend, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. The missing women in these books are almost certainly dead, but we don’t always find out.

So Much Pretty is also about a missing woman, although in this case we do find out what happened and it is not pretty. The woman in question is 19 year-old Wendy White. Born and raised in the rural town of Haeden, New York, where people know their neighbors and believe themselves safe from violence, Wendy is a cheerful, pretty girl who works at the neighborhood tavern.

Her disappearance and ultimate fate galvanizes two local women, reporter Stacy Flynn and high school student Alice Piper into action. They are both disturbed by Wendy’s fate, and even more disturbed by the town’s denial that someone from Haeden could be responsible; locals insist a stranger must have done this–even if the evidence says otherwise.

For me, what sets this book apart from the others is the underlying emotion of the story. It is not grief, or fear, or even anger. It is absolute fury. The kind of fury that reminds you the word was inspired by the avenging deities in Greek mythology who torment criminals. Avenging deities usually portrayed as female.

Cara Hoffman’s ability to harness that fury and not let it overwhelm the story bowled me over. Her writing is controlled and pointed and utterly merciless. For me, this was a tough and at times a painful read. Nevertheless, I haven’t stopped thinking about this book and I will remember it long past the time books usually fade in my memory.

Find and reserve this book in our online catalog.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

At one time, the travelers on the road to the Suhar International Airport in Mumbai could look out their car windows and see a tall, shiny, aluminum fence.  Ads for a company that sold floor tiles ran its length.  “Beautiful Forever” read the corporate slogan.

Behind that wall promising eternally beautiful floors lay what airport management didn’t want customers to see:  Annawadi, a slum first settled in 1991 by workers brought in from southern India to repair an airport runway.  Seventeen years later, when Katherine Boo did the research that led to this book, three thousand people still lived and worked there.

Boo introduces us to several Annawadi residents and gives us intimate glimpses into their lives.  There is Abdul, the young entrepreneur striving to improve the fortune of his family through recycling garbage.  We meet Asha, a rising star in the political life of the settlement.  We watch Abdul’s neighbor, Fatima, make a fateful choice that changes lives forever.

This is a gorgeously written book, but not an easy story to read.  Abdul, Asha and Fatima are people with few resources struggling to succeed in a corrupt system that does not seem very fair, especially to the poor.  Boo shows how precarious their lives are, and how quickly hardworking people can find their lives turned upside down by circumstance.

Boo, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and current staffer at The New Yorker, has spent two decades writing about poverty.  She hopes this book will “show American readers that the distance between themselves and, say, a teenaged boy in Mumbai who finds an entrepreneurial niche in other people’s garbage, is not nearly as great as they might think.”

She succeeded with this American reader.  I quickly grew to care about the people Boo portrays so vividly, especially Abdul.  The three years Boo spent in Annawadi researching this story were evident.  She made me see the dwellings and the faces of the people she met, and experience their daily struggles.

I would recommend this book to readers who like nonfiction that reads like fiction, people interested in India, readers with an interest in economic issues, nonfiction book clubs looking for a title with themes that easily lend themselves to discussion, and last, but not least, to devotees of beautiful writing.

Find and reserve this book in our online catalog.

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

I wanted to read The Psychopath Test: a Journey Through the Madness Industry for quite some time, not because I was interested in psychopaths, but because I am a huge fan of Jon Ronson. Jon Ronson is a British reporter who seems to have a knack for exploring the fringes of society. Ever get stuck behind someone in traffic with a plethora of homemade bumper stickers?  At parties, do you become a sounding board for someone offering unsolicited conspiracy theories? These are Jon Ronson’s people. Well, they aren’t his followers per se, but he is interested in exploring what they have to say. The good news is he takes you along for the ride from the comfort  and safety of your home.

Ronson’s journey is often full of trial and error with a good dose of humor and hilarity. Many years ago, I tried to read The Sociopath Next Door by  Martha Stout and found myself diagnosing a long time frenemy. I had to stop reading the book, it was too disturbing and the book was written with the idea of proximity. Jon Ronson’s humor, descriptive abilities and his willingness to laugh at himself makes this difficult and scary topic very palatable.

This book is informative and entertaining throughout. Many chapters are about the phenomena of psychopathy. Ronson interviews people classified as psychopaths and leading professionals.  As the book progresses, Ronson looks at the bigger picture of how we classify behavior as normal or as part of a mental illness.  He talks to Scientologists who are against psychiatry as well as professionals in the mental health field who place value on the tenets of their discipline. Between the extremes is a very gray area. Ronson is not afraid to second guess himself even if that means the reader too experiences confusion and doubt. One thing everyone can agree on, behavior classification impacts society and the individual exponentially.

By the way, I am pretty sure I am not a psychopath.

To see if you – or the people you know – are, find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell

I’m in a New York Mood this week, I suppose.  And, Joseph Mitchell is just the thing; though born in Southeastern Robeson County, Mitchell moved to NYC and began writing for The New Yorker.  For many writers he set the standard for stellar journalism.  Most of his pieces are profiles of unusual NYC locals; to explain why this book is so utterly engaging, I’m going to first talk about someone else.

My grandfather Johnny Sartori tended bar every day at the King Kong on the Bowery in the ‘40s and ‘50s.  Not one to crook an elbow, he preferred sober company to drinking.  When he wasn’t making friends, most of his time was spent either taking my grandmother dancing or my mother and uncle to Chinatown to eat with the proprietor’s family in the back of this or that restaurant (thus my mother’s penchant for frighteningly spicy food).  While my mother was still a child he died, apparently of heat stroke.  His experiences as a Bowery bartender, Italian immigrant, and war veteran died with him, save what my grandmother, uncle, and mother can recall.

Online you will find absolutely no trace of the King Kong Bar.  But I know it existed–I have a pile of old swizzle sticks that still bear the name (thin yellow plastic topped with a rearing elephant).

One afternoon I opened Up in the Old Hotel to read “Mazie,” an essay about a kind-hearted curmudgeon who “presided for twenty-one years over the ticket cage of the Venice Theatre, at 209 Park Row…where the Bowery begins.”  6 pages later, I caught my breath at this: “When she gets thirsty she sends an usher across the street to the King Kong Bar & Grill for a cardboard container of beer.”  Mazie’s story became, peripherally, my grandfather’s story.  Here were some of the odd Bowery folks he probably served from behind the bar.  Here were the same streets he walked when heading home to my family’s x-shaped building on St. James Place or to visit a friend’s restaurant on Mott or Mulberry.  Here are the people and places and peculiarities of New York City from the late 30s to the mid 50s, described by someone who lived there and loved it.

While neither a Luddite nor technophobe, I am generally irritated by the supposed panacea of Google, by those who assert that “everything is online.”   And while it is the case that there is a Google Books digital edition of this title, page 29 –the page where my grandfather’s bar is mentioned– “is not shown in this preview.”  A journalist’s narrative sure beats a handful of plastic swizzle sticks.  I’d hazard a guess that that’s true for the other 30+ essays that immortalize New York’s fishmongers, street preachers, bartenders, restaurant owners, drunks, bearded ladies, policemen, gypsies, and all the rest of it.

Check out or reserve a copy.