Here is a short column item from Mary Kramer, publisher of Crain’s Detroit Business, on Life with Mae: A Detroit Family Memoir.

Dec. 24, 2007

A good read 

Consider this a New Year's resolution: Read Neal Shine's Life with Mae: A Detroit Family Memoir. (Neal, of course, if he were here, would much prefer you buy the book.) 

Neal, who died earlier this year, was the longtime, much-loved editor and publisher of the Detroit Free Press. He had been at work on a book about his mother, and his adult children put the finishing touches on it for delivery to Wayne State University Press. 

How good is it? 

When I read it on a flight from Florida a couple of weeks ago, a woman sitting next to me asked me for the name of the book because I had been laughing aloud while reading it. 

It reads like he's sitting in the room, telling me the story. It's a wonderful memoir, especially if you "grew up Catholic" or love stories about Detroit. 

I have a shelf at home with books I've found from the 1920s and 1930s by Detroit journalists, writing about their city. I have crime and detective fiction by Loren Estleman and Elmore Leonard, the Grosse Pointe novels of Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex) and nonfiction works like Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice, a page-turner about the 1920s murder trial of a black doctor and his family who had defended their home from a white mob. 

Neal Shine's Life with Mae will have a special spot on the shelf. 

I only wish he were here to sign it.