Böcker av David J. Krajicek

In 1883, a young Irishwoman named Nellie McAuliffe ascended from the belly of a steamship in Boston Harbor and took her first steps in America. Leaving behind abject poverty, she had bravely set out for Nebraska, where she would meet and marry an industrious Scotsman, William Kinnear. They put down roots in the heart of South Omaha's booming Stockyards. In this family memoir, author David J. Krajicek uses interviews and American and European records to explore the lives of his maternal ancestors, weaving rich stories about his colorful kin and the gritty places they lived, including South Omaha's smudgy meatpacking district and the greasy railyards across the Missouri River in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where his people inhabited shacks on the wrong side of the tracks. As with his earlier memoir, Dear Mama, Krajicek uses a discerning eye and vivid storytelling to breathe life into his family's triumphs, tragedies, and quirks.

In 1936, a Nebraska housewife named Hazel Chandler Krajicek abandoned her husband and two young sons, ran off to Michigan, and never returned home. In Dear Mama, the American true crime writer David J. Krajicek explores the troubled life of Hazel, the grandmother he never knew. He learned that she was born into a raucous family whose home base was South Omaha's boisterous meatpacking district. Her kin included a heaping dose of miscreants--both major and minor--whose names popped up often in Omaha newspaper crime stories, including in connection with a cockamamie, booze-infused homicide that intimately involved Hazel's two sisters and their husbands. Hazel's story is told in part through dozens of heartrending letters from her sons, Eddie and Connie. "Mama, I don't want nothing for my birthday," the nine-year-old Eddie wrote in July 1937, nearly a year after she left. "Send me your picture if you can. That will be a birthday present from you to me." Hazel saved the letters for decades, and the author's father, Edward L. (Eddie) Krajicek, retrieved them after she died in 1981. The letters reveal Eddie's extraordinary sense of duty toward love a mother who rejected him. "You deserve all of the happiness in the world, mom," he wrote. His enduring kindness toward Hazel, on touching display in this book, serves as a paragon example of how one can graciously overcome a broken heart.

Why do Americans know so much about "celebrity criminals" and so little about crime? If crime is down, why is there so much mayhem on television news and in the newspapers? This book seeks to answer these and other questions, to attempt to make sense of crime, crime news and crime policy in the US.