Nine other writers might well have selected nine different subjects, which serves as a tribute to the indomitable Irish...
Essays on “nine Irish men and women [who] not only became American but also helped make America great.”
What makes these pieces work so well is the connection each writer feels with the chosen subject, with those not primarily known as writers revealing as much about themselves as their subject through their choice. For example, Rosie O’Donnell writes about helping the recovery in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and coming upon a statue of a woman with a child under her arm. It identified the woman only as Margaret, but O’Donnell identified strongly with this woman who had selflessly devoted her life to orphans. O’Donnell has considered herself an orphan since the death of her mother and has adopted five children. “I see myself in her,” she writes. Then there’s Irish émigré Pierce Brosnan, who identifies strongly with the experience of silent film director Rex Ingram, since both were primarily interested in visual art even after turning to acting—and both found that “Hollywood and the movie business was an empire built almost entirely by immigrants, men and women who had recently arrived in our country and who were in fact looking to reinvent themselves.” Film provocateur Michael Moore picks muckraking pioneer Samuel S. McClure, and he laments how the age of Trump could benefit from his example. Mark Shriver, who runs Save Our Children, connects some dots in the story of Boys Town’s Father Edward J. Flanagan. The piece by novelist Kathleen Hill on New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan is mostly literary criticism, in appreciation of someone who didn’t receive her due until her posthumous collection of stories—the renowned writer and editor William Maxwell had judged her “the best living Irish writer of fiction, but in her own country she was almost entirely unknown.”
Nine other writers might well have selected nine different subjects, which serves as a tribute to the indomitable Irish character and the transformational possibilities of America. This is a perfect St. Patrick’s Day anthology for the Irish book lover on your gift list.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61620-517-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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