A BOOMER'S TALE

By Tom Henderson

A Life Lived on Deadline, Danger, and Dumb Luck

Fearless • Unflinching • Witty • Observant • Resilient
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A Boomer's Tale cover — Tom Henderson

A Boomer's Tale

An Unfiltered Memoir of Risk, Freedom, and Survival

A Boomer's Tale is a raw, honest memoir of a life lived at full speed through modern America's most turbulent decades. From the 1960s counterculture to journalism, travel, addiction, recovery, and endurance sports, it captures what it felt like to live inside history—not look back on it. Unpolished and unapologetic, this book offers truth over nostalgia and experience over comfort.

Pages: Approximately 470+ pages

Format: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook

Genre: Memoir / Journalism / True Crime

Audience: Mature readers (18+)

Tone: Candid, investigative, darkly humorous

Key Themes:

  • The rise and fall of American newspapers
  • Addiction, recovery, and personal reckoning
  • True crime reporting and judicial power
  • Cultural shifts from the 1950s through the digital age
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About This Work

A Boomer's Tale is a vivid, unfiltered memoir that chronicles one American life lived at full speed through journalism, addiction, recovery, crime reporting, travel, and improbable luck. Spanning postwar Detroit, gritty metropolitan newsrooms, sunburned beaches in Florida and the Caribbean, and high-stakes courtrooms, this book captures the texture of a life shaped by words, deadlines, and consequences. This is not nostalgia, revisionist history, or self-mythology. It is a firsthand account of how American journalism once worked, how it unraveled, and how a working reporter survived cultural shifts, personal excess, and institutional collapse. Henderson writes with a reporter's discipline and a survivor's honesty, allowing events to speak for themselves.

What This Book Reveals

The Inside Life of Journalism

A rare, ground-level view of American newspapers at their peak and during their decline. From copyboy duties and city room chaos to Pulitzer-winning editors and shrinking news budgets, the book documents how reporting was taught, practiced, and eventually dismantled by economic and technological change.

Addiction and Escape

Cocaine, alcohol, psychedelics, and the search for relief from pressure and identity. These experiences are presented without romance or apology, showing how excess intersects with ambition, boredom, fear, and self-deception.

True Crime from the Inside

A behind-the-scenes look at how true-crime books are born. Henderson recounts the improbable chain of events that led to a New York literary agent, major publishers, and courtroom stories involving corrupt judges, wrongful convictions, and prosecutorial misconduct.

A Life of Accidents and Miracles

Emails sent on impulse, phone calls that changed careers, stolen boats that reappeared, chance friendships, and unexpected grace. The book examines how luck repeatedly intervenes—sometimes saving, sometimes complicating a life.

Core Themes

This story examines how work shapes identity, excess exacts its quiet toll, and power decides whose truth survives. Between newsrooms and courtrooms, it asks who gets protected and who gets broken.

Work and Identity

  • Journalism as craft, apprenticeship, and obsession
  • The newsroom as a surrogate family
  • Reinvention after careers and institutions collapse

Excess and Consequence

  • Drugs as coping mechanisms rather than rebellion
  • The slow cost of unchecked freedom
  • Survival without glamorizing damage

Justice and Power

  • Courtroom politics and hidden incentives
  • Media influence on public truth
  • Who gets railroaded, and why

Complete Book Contents

Eight Parts, One Life — expand each part to read a short description.

Part I – The Happiest House Ever
Postwar Detroit, immigrant neighborhoods, family origins, and the early formation of identity.
Part II – Back to the Future: Fessin' Up to the Drug Stuff
Addiction, denial, self-awareness, and the consequences that follow.
Part III – Getting Into True Crime
Softball, body lice, freelancing luck, and the unexpected call from a New York literary agent.
Part IV – Back to the Past
Revisiting childhood, early mistakes, and long-ignored damage.
Part V – Wild Times in Florida
Drugs, stolen credit cards, psychedelics, danger, and survival on the margins.
Part VI – A Schmoe Like Me Got to Know These Guys?
Encounters with famous athletes, political figures, editors, and power brokers.
Part VII – Every Book Needs More Key West
Freedom, sunburn, strange friendships, and the illusion of escape.
Part VIII – Love at the End of the Rainbow
Aging, reflection, endurance, and what remains when ambition quiets.
Epilog & Postscript
Dogs, distance running, journalism awards, and late-life meaning.

Selected Excerpts

Luck is real. So is stupidity. Sometimes they cancel each other out.

Journalism was never a job. It was a place you went to prove you were alive.

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Hardcover

Deluxe, 6x9 • Cloth & Dust Jacket
$25.99

Premium edition with dust jacket. Perfect for collectors and gifts.

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Paperback

Mass Market • Lightweight
$16.99

Portable and affordable. Take it anywhere you go.

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eBook

Digital EPUB / Kindle
$7.99

Instant download. Read on any device, anytime.

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Experience the memoir that readers are calling "brutally honest" and "impossible to put down"

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What Readers Are Saying

★★★★★

"Henderson doesn't pull punches. This is the most honest memoir I've read in years—raw, unflinching, and absolutely riveting. He captures an era with all its contradictions intact."

— Sarah Mitchell, Goodreads

★★★★★

"Finally, a boomer who tells it like it was, not how we wished it had been. Henderson's journalism background shines through in every page. Compulsively readable and brutally authentic."

— James Chen, Amazon Reviewer

★★★★★

"I couldn't put this down. Henderson writes with the confidence of someone who has nothing left to prove and nothing left to hide. A masterclass in memoir writing."

— BookPage Reviews

★★★★★

"This book punched me in the gut—in the best way. Henderson's dark humor and unflinching self-examination make this more than just another boomer memoir. It's essential reading."

— Literary Hub

★★★★★

"As a millennial, I thought I'd be skeptical, but Henderson won me over completely. He doesn't make excuses or demand sympathy—just tells his truth with devastating clarity."

— Rachel Torres, The Reading Life Blog

★★★★★

"Henderson has written the anti-nostalgia memoir we desperately needed. Sharp, honest, and utterly compelling. This is what happens when a real journalist turns the lens on himself."

— Marcus Webb, Indie Book Review

About the Author

Tom Henderson

Tom Henderson is a veteran American journalist and author whose career spans copyboy work in major metropolitan newsrooms, investigative reporting, magazine writing, and nationally published true-crime books. He learned journalism from the ground up—running copy, sharpening pencils, editing wire stories, and eventually reporting on crime, courts, business, and public corruption.

Over decades, Henderson witnessed the golden age of newspapers and their steady dismantling. His work reflects a belief in reporting as public service, even when institutions fail to uphold that ideal. A Boomer's Tale is his most personal work, combining lived experience with a reporter's discipline.

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Contact

For press inquiries, speaking engagements, or rights requests:
Email: thenderson@crain.com