“I was born a bastard and I’ve been one all my life. I became a journalist.”

So begins Joseph P. Ritz’s story of his search for his background and his career as a journalist and playwright. The award-winning newsman tells why he never aggressively tried to discover who his parents were. He tells of his questions about his father and mother and describes a midwestern Catholic childhood with a foster mother who disguised her voice when she answered the telephone because she believed callers thought she has secrets and a volatile foster father who had a deserved reputation for violence. There is brutality in the book. There is also humor, madness and mischief.

The book is a journey which leads to an understanding of what he owes the couple who raised him and the mother, said to be a sister of two priests, who gave him up.

It also describes the failures and frustrations of a daily newspaper reporter and his impressions of some of the famous people he encountered such as Harry S Truman, Richard Nixon and Martin Luther King. It tells of interviewing a multiple murderer and the agony of questioning ordinary men and women who are in the news because of a terrible misfortune such as killing their child. It tells of family funerals at which mourners debated whether police were justified in shooting the deceased and the son of the man in the coffin arrived with a prison guard.

It describes days spent with a mob-connected news source hiding from his associates in Costa Nostra and using a ruse to enter the home of a Mafia godfather.

It is critical of some practices of newspapers today and offers ideas of how they can be made more readable.