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

Kirkus Reviews
Journalist O’Connor’s riveting debut traces a childhood shaped by his mother’s and father’s lies and his adult quest to uncover the truths they hid.

The author grew up knowing virtually nothing of his parents’ pasts or extended families, though his mother’s accent did reveal that she was English. The absence of cousins and grandparents was just one oddity. The O’Connors were also constantly moving, establishing tentative, tenuous households and then fleeing town in the middle of the night. They had a particular fear of government officials, and any encounter with cops left Mrs. O’Connor shaken for days. Given all this moving, the O’Connors were unable to make much money, and they slipped from a precarious perch in the middle class to shocking poverty. In late adolescence, the author finally recognized that life at home was poisonous, his parents unstable and deceptive. He moved out and had only sporadic contact with them in the ensuing decades, when he worked as a reporter for CBS News, the New York Times and NPR.

Only after both his parents died did O’Connor’s two younger sisters beg him to tackle the mystery of their lives as though it were a political scandal he was assigned to expose. He began to dig, grudgingly at first but then increasingly determined to discover the secrets that had shaped his childhood. His research took him to Boston, where he connected with his father’s large family; to Burnley, England, where an elderly union organizer told him stories about his mother and uncle; and into the offices of the CIA, FBI and INS, following a sketchy paper trail that shed light on the government’s interest in his parents.

O’Connor is a sympathetic narrator, never bitter, who reveals the complexities of every last character. By the end of this suspenseful memoir, readers will be just as eager as the author to discover what kept his family on the run.

Booklist
O’Connor grew up on the run with his family, throwing their possessions together in a rush to flee the U.S.across the border into Mexico, then weeks, months, or years later, just as frantically throwing possessions together to return to the U.S., always crossing at odd hours or weak border points with a contrived story about a weary, cheerful tourist family. As he grew up, his family, “turning against the obvious and the logical,” found comfort in one another—a family bound by its flight. At an early age, O’Connor developed the skills of the foreign correspondent he would eventually become. Quickly absorbing new cultures, he worked for a while in Mexico as an unofficial tour guide, a pillow salesman in the slums.

He felt a growing rift with his parents as hardships and instability finally wore down his confidence and heightened his anxiety about the secret that kept them running. After his parents’ deaths, O’Connor reluctantly began the process of peeling back their history, discovering a family he never knew he had and unlocking the secret that kept his parents running most of their lives. A riveting tale of family secrets and national politics.
— Vanessa Bush

Library Journal
Born in 1946 Germany to an American father and British mother who soon emigrated to the United States, O'Connor grew up with two younger sisters in Houston, TX, and then Mexico and California with parents ever "on the run" from some dreadful family secret that meant overnight moves across the U.S.-Mexico border. The O'Connors had no relatives, though they played at being a good Irish Catholic family whenever possible, with the children enrolled in parochial school. Still, the children knew that that there was something sinister in their past. The author was 26 years old when his father died, and the secret was kept for another 25 years. It was only after his mother died that his sisters prodded him to investigate, something he was highly qualified to do as a journalist, first with CBS News and then as an overseas reporter for the New York Times and National Public Radio. His autobiography reads like the best kind of mystery novel. In the end, there's more than one secret, along with 21 first cousins from Boston. Recommended for public libraries