Customer Reviews

Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe: A Memoir of Life on the Run

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This memoir is a wonderful and heart-wrenching story about family, secrets and politics. O'Connor's family -- a tightnit Boston Irish-Catholic clan from Boston -- is a casualty of Hoover-era policies. O'Connor has a very good writing style, crafted during his many years as a foreign correspondent. The reasons for why his family ran should resonate for any families finding themselves mired in the policies of the War on Terror today. Anyone will enjoy this book, as it is a very good read. Highest recommendation!

Mike O'Connor's spellbinding style of writing takes the reader along on flights through childhood trust and resiliency, teenage survival and misadventure, adult investigations and understanding. Mysteries, danger, suspicions, uncertainty, wonder, and significant historical details are made even more fascinating because they are true. Mike's family's experiences with the fears and paranoia of the McCarthy era are relevant to today as we struggle with fears of terrorism. You will love the book's ending. I did!

A story of courageous and resilient children. Children trusting and believing that their parents would take care of them. A story of the slow process to the truth - that these parents would throw their children to the wolves to save themselves. The more I read the madder I got.

A fascinating story of a family kept together and then torn apart by parents forced to escape from one place to another, literally in the middle of the night, over and over again. Told by the son, many years later, after painful research on why his family had lived that way.

The roads they traveled - through Italy, England, Canada, Mexico, Texas, Boston, California, Maine, Afghanistan - chart a fascinating multi-generational journey. While the fabric of this family is not unlike many other American families: immigrants and soldiers, bootstraps and traditions, expectations and disappointments, the paths they took together and individually toward, and mostly away from, their hopes and dreams are nothing short of bizarre.

Told from a boy's desire to make sense of his chaotic world, this is a story of a mother torn between her love for a man with big plans and a hidden past, and for their children, who at first blindly accept, then secretly question, and finally uncover the truth of their lives on the run. This forced dynamic lays the groundwork for the narrator's journalism career and his discovery of the real and imagined forces that propelled them into perpetually unknown territory. However, the non-stop fear it imposed on their lives is a frustrating and eye-opening American tragedy.

That a church was a false sanctuary, a crib became an arrest warrant, or a family pet could potentially cause children to be torn from their parents - the unimaginable real threats they faced blurred their perception of innocent events so that the slightest trigger would send this family packing. The lengths to which over-zealous authorities and unforgiving traditionalists would go to keep these people in line with their dogma are mind-boggling.

If we were to just take a step back - when faced with political or family crises - and imagine for a moment the effects of unbending adherence to one perspective, we may find ourselves with far less societal and family dysfunction.

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The Kite Runner (Riverhead Essential Editions)
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The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness
Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America
Fall of Baghdad, The
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible

A great read. This is a riveting story - with a very unlikely ending. I recommend it highly.

This is a wonderful book about a family, a boy, and precarious times in the not too distant past that carry an uncomfortable resonance today. It is a tense, often scary read that's hard to put down. The motivations for all the secrets in this story are both uniquely personal and powerfully relevant. Even as the forces behind the fear and running are revealed, the experiences of a boy trying to cope with the palpable tension that clings to his family remain the unforgettable heart of this story.

I'd give it SIX Stars if I could! This is because the story-line and the storytelling are superb. (Actually, there were many stories) ... from the story of a youngster living on the run while his parents say there is nothing to be afraid of, to the stories of growing up on the bad streets of Mexico. However, the one story that motivates it all is the one of the bad times in the U.S. when the FBU could get you in trouble just for your political beliefs, even if the FBI had made a mistake! That is what I believe makes the book so valuable today. This book was a great read. I couldn't put it down.

Tedious and only mildly interesting. I kept hoping the pace would pick up, but it never did. It promised more than it delivered. I expected more from a professional journalist. A waste of time.

As an inhabitant of a house filled with those for whom the lessons of history matter more than the scramble of today's news, I was pulled into the story of Mike O'Connor's life and family more forcefully than anything I've read in recent years. (In my home, the mere mention of J Edgar is enough to spark a rampage of argument and rage for a few hours. Add in that era's anti-Red crowd in Boston and throughout the U.S., and you pretty much need to cancel the rest of your appointments for the day.) O'Connor's straightforward rendering of his family's life in the ominous period of anti-communist America reminds us of how close history is to our lives today.

But this is not a political screed. Nor is it weighed down with pages of historical facts. "Crisis, Pursued by Disaster ..." is about what happens when the peculiarities of families and individuals are absorbed and amplified by the world they live in.

Most important, be aware that O'Connor not only can knock out a fine line of text, he can tell a complete story. His remembrances may make you cringe at times, but his skillful mix of humor, irony and frank reporting about the preposterous situations he and his family encountered (and often created) is too magnetic to pass up. I was left fulfilled by the literature but worried about lingering effects on him and his family -- and concerned for all of us about the lessons of history being ignored. When you read this book, be prepared to think about your own life and family as deeply as O'Connor has considered his own.