Local attorney uncovers his father's dark secret and the reason he took on Teamsters Jimmy Hoffa

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/books/478457,CST-BOOKS-BKCHILIT22.article

Books

Battle for redemption
CHICAGO LIT | Local attorney uncovers his father's dark secret and the reason he took on Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa

July 22, 2007
BY JOE KOLINA
On a quiet, bittersweet day not long before the end, Steven Harper sat with his dying father, his heart filled with love.

James Harper lay in the mechanical bed his family had wheeled into the living room of his house to make him more comfortable. Father and son, his first born, spoke of many things, final things.

"Suddenly, it just shot out," Harper says. "My father told me he thought he hadn't done anything right in his life."

Steven was about to find out how wrong his father was. After his death, he opened the metal box his father kept locked. Inside, among the prosaic keepsakes of a long life, was evidence of another, darker life.

Crossing Hoffa is Steven's love letter to his father, the story of James Harper's tortured journey from the thoughtlessly devastating sin of his youth to the hard-earned redemption of a full-grown man.

"My father always spoke with pride about an episode when he was a truck driver and had gone after his Minneapolis Teamsters union local for misuse of funds," Harper says. "But when I opened that box I learned that he had inadvertently taken on Jimmy Hoffa."

BIOGRAPHY
CROSSING HOFFA
A TEAMSTER'S STORY
By Steven Harper
Borealis Books, 218 pages, $24.95

FULL article at link.