About Mike
Like their father, grandfather and great grandfather before them, Mike and his seven brothers were born on the West Side of Chicago. Mike worked his way through college shoveling furnaces at South Bend Foundry during the school year and driving trucks in the summer. Following graduation from the University of Notre Dame, where he was a less-than-stellar member of the hockey team, Mike spent several years trying to figure out things he should have figured out years before. He worked as a truck driver, cab driver, construction laborer, dockworker and even did a little freelance journalism for the Irish Press in Dublin.
Mike was a 24-year-old, uninspired construction laborer when a coworker asked him how much longer he was going to continue to piss away his life. That rude awakening made Mike reexamine his priorities, return to school, and pursue a career in medicine. His days as a laborer trying to get into medical school are chronicled in Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs (St. Martin’s Press). Citing a case of what he insists was divine intervention, Mike was ultimately admitted to the Loyola Stritch School of Medicine in Chicago. Upon graduation he spent five years in residency at the Mayo Clinic. His years as resident and inveterate moonlighter in rural Minnesota emergency rooms are the subject of Hot Lights, Cold Steel (St. Martin’s Press).
Mike’s third book, All Bleeding Stops (Friesen Press, 2021), tells the story of Matthew Barrett, combat surgeon in the Vietnam War. Mike says he hoped to raise awareness of the difficulty doctors face in learning to care for and about their patients. The same qualities of compassion, sensitivity, and dedication that draw young people to a career in medicine, often sow the seeds of their own destruction. Sometimes they simply care too much. “A generation of young men went to Vietnam naive and idealistic,” Mike says. “They returned home broken and disillusioned—if they returned at all. We doctors are often victims of a similar fate. Like soldiers, the things we see and do are often too much to bear. And, like soldiers, not all of us make it back.”
Mike’s fourth book, The Shieling (Friesen Press, 2024), tells the story of David Carroll, a surgeon wrongly accused of murder. Pursued by both the FBI and a ruthless gang of Russian mobsters, David seeks shelter in a shieling, a remote shepherd’s hut in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His solitude is disturbed by Catriona Gordon, a young Scottish anthropologist who is doing research on shielings. Despite their initial antagonism, David and Catriona begin to warm to each other as the Russians close in.
His next book, The Least of Men (Friesen Press, 2026), is a sequel to The Shieling. It follows David, Catriona and their two children whose quiet lives are shattered when they are targeted by a mysterious woman and catapulted into a world of violence and child abduction.
Mike’s latest book, Retired Ground, A Climber’s Odyssey (Friesen Press, 2026) is loosely based on a travel journal Mike kept for over fifty years. Drawing on the works of poets, philosophers, theologians, and mountaineers, it details the extraordinary transformation mountains brought about in him. Over a long climbing career, time after time, year after year, Mike would stand at the summit of some remote peak, filled with reverence and awe as he gazed on the beauty of the world spread out below him. Those dimly understood moments of transcendence started him on a lifelong journey to uncover “the last reality that underlies mountain beauty”—a journey that ended one remarkable night on top of a mountain on the Isle of Skye.
Since the publication of his first book in 2005, Mike has lectured throughout the country on topics relating to medicine and writing. He has served as the Alpha Omega Alpha Visiting Professor at both the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, and at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine where he also delivered the 2016 commencement address.
Mike and his wife, Patti still live in Chicago in the same house they’ve lived in for forty years. They have raised twelve wonderful kids, who may have aged them prematurely but of whom they are immensely proud.