Working title and cover
The Things You BuildAfter
Loss, recovery, and the city he wouldn't let go of.
A stroke nearly killed him. Then he lost his son, then his marriage of thirty years. Through all of it, Dan Gilbert kept building: a body, a family, a foundation, and a riverfront rising on the Cuyahoga. This is the story of what a person makes after the things that defined him fall away.
Jimkukral@gmail.com for preview copies or media inquiries.
You already know the loud part.
In 2010, LeBron James left Cleveland on national television, and Dan Gilbert answered the only way he knew how. He posted an open letter to fans, in Comic Sans, calling it a betrayal and guaranteeing a championship to a city that had not seen one in over forty years. The league fined him a hundred thousand dollars. The internet never let him forget the font. For years it looked like the angriest empty promise in sports. Then, in 2016, the Cavaliers delivered Cleveland its first title in fifty-two years. That is the Dan Gilbert most people know: stubborn, willing to be wrong in public if it meant being right in the end. This book is about the quieter rebuilds that came after, the ones no letter announced.
It was the first time the country watched him lose something and build his answer in public. It would not be the last.
What a person builds after losing the things they thought defined them is the truest measure of who they are.
Not a billionaire biography. A book about after.
In May 2019, an ischemic stroke left Dan Gilbert paralyzed on his left side and fighting to walk again. Four years later he buried his 26-year-old son, Nick, who had spent his life battling the disease the family had built a foundation to cure. Last fall, after three decades, his marriage ended.
And through every one of those years, Gilbert kept building. A riverfront on the Cuyahoga. A performance center. A WNBA franchise. A generational bet on downtown Cleveland, placed at the exact moment another billionaire was pulling his team out of town.
This is not a stroke memoir and it is not a victory lap. It's a book about what a person does when the foundations come out from under them, and why the work that comes after is so often the truest work of a life. Cleveland is the stage. The lessons travel.
Four things being rebuilt at once.
The book follows three recoveries that overlap in time, and a fourth thing rising alongside them.
Learning to walk again
Eight weeks of rehab in Chicago. The slow, unglamorous, daily work of getting an arm back.
Carrying Nick forward
The loss too big for length, and the foundation work that turns grief into a continuation.
An ending, handled with grace
A thirty-year marriage closed quietly and honestly, with one thing still built together.
Picking Cleveland
Thirty-five acres on the river. The most consequential bet a city has placed on itself in a generation.
Everything is hard. Everything. You're, like, trapped in your own body.
Two readers at once.
The man behind the bet
Anyone who wants to understand the person behind the riverfront, the Cavs, and the city's most consequential bet on itself in a generation.
Anyone living their own after
Anyone who has lived their own version of after, and wants to know what to do next. Cleveland is the case. The idea is universal.
A specific story that becomes a national one through a clear, repeatable idea.
A regional story told with such care that it travels far beyond its place.
A book about a body that fails and a life that keeps building anyway.
Jim Kukral, LET'S GO CLE
A Cleveland writer, telling a Cleveland story that travels.
Jim Kukral is the founder of LET'S GO CLE, a long-time author and speaker, and the chronicler behind The Misny Method and The CLE Report. He writes about the people who build the city, and the cost and meaning of what they build.
The Things You Build After is his most personal Cleveland book yet, a portrait of the man whose name is on more of this town's skyline than anyone else's, told from the part of the story that comes after the headline.