One thing not mentioned in the obit was that Mike actually wrote a lot for the News’ arts coverage — for years he regularly contributed very succinct, pithy reviews of “self help” and “business advice” books for the Sunday pages. As you might imagine, many of these books are repetitive, self-evident, redundant, naive, pompous, flimsily argued or supported, etc. I would have started tearing the books with my teeth after only a few weeks of covering them. Uncomplainingly but with dry humor, Mike managed to summarize book after book, convey a little of its flavor and manage to treat them honestly but also indicate his own disdain for many of the worst. And all of this in only a few lines.

I thought his work was tremendously under-appreciated. it was just filler; it certainly didn’t get the play or attention that, say, many self-important op-ed columnists regularly do. But week after week, Mike actually made this stuff entertaining, sometimes deadpan-funny. I rarely cared about any of the books he wrote about; I read the column for Mike’s writing.

The publishing industry certainly knew what they had. When I was book critic, I’d occasionally get a call from a publicist who was looking for Mike — because he was the only newspaper critic in the country who covered most of these things.

As a result of all this, he was one of the very few editors (or, really, anyone) at the News whose judgment I truly respected — on ways to improve my own writing, on the quality of books or stage shows we’d be arguing about. An added bonus: We had both started out in Detroit papers at the exact same time (along the Dallas Observer’s Jim Schutze) and knew many of the same veterans — yet we had never run into each other back then. It gave us a storehouse of shared names and stories to swap.

Fabulous remembrances and words of comfort from you all. This is appreciated right now more than you can imagine! No wonder he liked working with you so much!