After Visiting Friends
by Michael Hainey
Buy on AmazonMichael 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, had been found dead near his car on Chicago's North Side 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.…
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"Who was Michael Hainey’s newspaper-reporter father really with on the night he dropped dead? His sons were told one thing; their father’s obit alluded to another. So Hainey, now a journalist himself, digs into his dad’s life, knowing he may not like what he finds. It’s a beautiful story, but the real reason to pick up this book is its atmosphere — juicy descriptions of journalism in the ‘60s, when editors included “slot men” and they smoked and drank and spat into the wastebaskets, cranking out editions of the local paper late into the night."
NPR Books We Love — 2013 · apps.npr.org
"“After Visiting Friends,” by Michael Hainey"
By the Book: Jeannette Walls · nytimes.com