Success,
In Spite of Myself.

The book opens with the author riding horseback around the pyramids at sunset. It is a strange place to begin a Chicago story, and that is the point.

Adopted at birth into a family on the South Side, homeless by seventeen, Thomas A. Cronin worked his way to Loras College in Dubuque and then into a United States Coast Guard recruiter's office. The service sent him overseas, with postings including Egypt and Saipan: radar work in Egypt, a brief marriage into an Egyptian family, and a set of stories that give the memoir several of its most improbable chapters. He came home with a Distinguished Service Medal.

What came next was Enron. When Sarbanes-Oxley became law, Cronin founded TrumbullCrow Consulting and worked inside Fortune 500 boardrooms, writing bylined columns for CIO and BusinessWeek. A hepatitis C diagnosis interrupted the trajectory; a clinical trial provided a cure. Single fatherhood arrived on its own timetable. In 2023 he sold the firm and returned to the desk.

The result is a memoir that reads like reporting from inside a life most people only read about — gritty, honest, adventurous, and, in the end, quietly redemptive.