Everyone Leaves Behind a Name: True Stories

Michael Brick is one of those writers who never leaves your side, and what pleasurable company he provides.

In reading this collection of his newspaper and magazine stories from Brooklyn, Houston, and beyond, picture the man. Tall, and lanky, and so proud to be Texan, wearing a brown vest and cowboy boots, his narrow reporter’s notebook in his back pocket slapping at his flat ass, as if urging him onward because these blank pages needed filling.

Brick’s words breathe life into his subjects. H...