Leave Out the Tragic Parts A Grandfather's Search for a Boy Lost to Addiction

This extraordinary investigation of the death of the author's grandson yields a powerful memoir of addiction, grief, and the stories we choose to tell our families and ourselves. Jared Kindred left his home and family at the age of eighteen, choosing to wander across America on freight train cars and live on the street. Addicted to alcohol most of his short life, and withholding the truth from many who loved him, he never found a way to survive. Through this ordeal, Dave Kindred's love for his grandson has never wavered. Leave Out the Tragic Parts is not merely a reflection on love and addiction and loss. It is a hard-won work of reportage, meticulously reconstructing the life Jared chose for himself--a life that rejected the comforts of civilization in favor of a chance to roam free. Kindred asks painful but important questions about the lies we tell to get along, and what binds families together or allows them to fracture. Jared's story ended in tragedy, but the act of telling it is an act of healing and redemption. This is an important book on how to love your family, from a great writer who has lived its lessons.

Dave Kindred has been a columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The National Sports Daily, Sporting News, and Golf Digest. Kindred is the author of several books including Heroes, Fools and Other Dreamers: A Sportswriter's Gallery of Extraordinary People, Around the World in 18 Holes, Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post The Fight to Keep a Great Newspaper Alive, and Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship.

Kindred is one of only two writers who have earned sportswriting's three highest honors: the Red Smith Award, the PEN America ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He also has won the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame's Curt Gowdy Award (for outstanding media contributions) as well as a National Headliner award for general-interest columns. He is a member of The National Sports Media Hall of Fame. He lives in Illinois.