““Family?” I said “Secrets?” Sometimes I think they are the same thing.” Michael Hainey leaves us with idea …….When his father suddenly dies, leaving behind two boys, a wife and a trail of questions that no one wanted to answer for young Michael. For years, the family avoided the subject of his father, until the author decided to track down whatever true story there was. His personal investigation takes him across the country and into strangers' lives, … (Hainey's writing is balletic, nimbly avoiding both sentimentality and, making grief and absence into powerful and fully felt forces.) His short scenes he crafts appear like memoires, prose poems of what once was, and he skillfully weaves a narrative that transcends his own and spans generations. From family history to Chicago lore, Hainey searches the deepest fissures of memory and finds a hidden and entire "world of men, of stories, of knowledge" that wasn't there before. An unforgettable story.
The story is powerful and gripping. It's one of these books that is impossible to put down. He writes with such honesty and beauty. You read about family (their past), the old newspaper world (they have a coda of sticking together), how he went about his investigation, and what he found.
Hainey is the deputy editor of GQ. This is his first book and I hope it's not his last. Truly tremendous writing. ivilization is a term that could be used in many different ways. It can be defined as people who speak the same language, eat the same food, and live together. No matter how it’s classified it all comes down to this one main idea: their existence on earth . A civilization is a starting point of a society. The early civilization were successful due to irrigation, religion, and writing. The conditions for farming were favored in river valleys.
Floodwaters spread slit across the valley renewing the soil keeping it fertile and soften. The river gave people a regular source of drinking water and transportation. Farmers learned how to control the floods and create channels to bring water into the fields. Early farmers built dikes, dug canals, and built irrigation systems. This was because this advancement of crop irrigation helped produce a surplus of food, which helped support the growth of cities. Due to the surplus of resources that irrigation provided. It allowed a division of labor, so that some proportion of the population could devote their time to other subjects that were found as part of society. Civilizations were able to expand and establish unity among a large population of people through