BOOK REVIEWS By Tom Deignan
A Sampling of the Latest Irish Books Recommended  The doomed Fe-nian invasion of Canada, when Irish rebels invaded the then-English colony, is at the center of historical novelist Tom Fleming’s latest page-turner A Passionate Girl.
The novel revolves around beautiful and rebellious Bess Fitzmaurice. She falls for Dan McCaffrey, an Irish-American visiting Ireland in 1865 to aid the Fenian revolt against Britain. Dan, an American Civil War veteran, is being hunted by British forces. So, Bess and her brother help get Dan on a ship to the U.S. which, of course, has not yet recovered from the Civil War.
When Fleming’s characters land in New York, crime, politics and outright corruption all clash, amidst romantic longing and envy. In the meantime, the rebels manage to launch the invasion of Canada, only to be double-crossed by their allies.
Fleming’s characters are lively and sharp-tongued, and once again he brings history on both sides of the Atlantic to life.
The Jersey City-born son of a powerful machine politician, Fleming is the author of more than 40 books. He is perhaps best known for his 1981 novel, The Officers’ Wives. But it is his overall body of work – which is heavily Irish and Irish American – that by now is most impressive.
With A Passionate Girl, Fleming sheds new, not to mention entertaining, light on a key moment in U.S. and Irish history. ($25.95 / 416 pages / Forge) Non-fiction In Blue Blood, his much anticipated memoir of life as an NYPD detective, Edward Conlon tells this joke. CIA agents, FBI agents and Bronx NYPD detectives gather in the woods and are told to hunt down a rabbit. The first two groups nab their quarry in minutes, but after two hours the Bronx guys have not returned. When they finally do, they have subdued a giant bear, who is saying: “OK, OK, I’m a rabbit.”
At its best, Conlon’s book is full of such revealing anecdotes: they are honest, funny, sometimes awful and always complex.
Blue Blood is easily one of the most revealing looks ever at life “on the job.” Conlon confronts urban squalor as well as absurd bureaucratic nitpicking within the department itself.
Blue Blood is also timely. Conlon outlines the dangers of “vertical patrols” – that is, patrolling high rise apartment projects from lobby to roof. Earlier this year there was a controversial police shooting in Brooklyn, New York, following just such a vertical patrol.
To flesh out this book (which, it must be said, is too long) Conlon looks not only to New York history and St. Augustine, but also his own Irish family’s history in New York. His grandfather was an infamously corrupt police officer, while Conlon’s Dad was an upwardly mobile FBI agent. Conlon himself went to Harvard, and it shows. Some of the writing in Blue Blood is gorgeous. It is not surprising, then, that Conlon’s Dad was shocked, even disappointed, when his son decided to, well, enter the family business.
Such conflicting emotions make Blue Blood often as poignant as it is dramatic. ($26.95 / 512 pages / Riverhead)
Ireland’s preeminent contemporary historian Tim Pat Coogan is back with another fat, packed and highly informative book. Ireland in the 20th Century is a typically thorough effort from Coogan, the author most recently of Wherever Green is Worn: The Story of The Irish Diaspora.
Coogan begins with a look at Ireland before the 1916 Easter Rising and takes us right up to the current peace process. Particularly outstanding are his portraits of Sean LeMass and Ian Paisley. Coogan, again, has set a standard which future historians are sure to follow. ($35 / 877 pages / Palgrave)
Set a bit further in the past, Peter Berresford Ellis (who writes popular mysteries under the name Peter Tremayne) has written a useful new history. The Celts: A History explains that by around the third century B.C., Celtic people had spread west to Ireland, east to Turkey, north to Belgium and south to Spain.
They had also developed innovative agricultural techniques adopted by the Romans and cut the first roads through black European forests. Overall, Ellis successfully argues that the Celts – which is to say, the Irish, Manx, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons – made contributions to Western culture which survive to this day. ($13 / 235 pages / Carroll & Graf)
Historians often note that women in ancient Ireland were legally equal to men.
Under the Brehon Laws women were afforded the right to own property, seek an education, and even sue for divorce. Celtic women were also handy on the battlefield, often taking up arms and marching into battle alongside their brothers, uncles and husbands. Author Helen Walsh Folsom believes this unique heritage accounts for what she sees as their passionate, fiery spirit.
Folsom’s new book Ah, Those Irish Colleens! Heroic Women of Ireland is filled with the stories of the incredible lives of more than a dozen Irish women.
There’s Deirdre of the Sorrows, whom a druid predicted would grow into a beautiful woman but would be the cause of much strife among men; Grace O’Malley, pirate and seafarer from the 1500s; and even Mary O’Connor, the muse to the poet who wrote “The Rose of Tralee.”
Folsom proudly proclaims that she herself is of “Celtic descent.” A writer and former newspaper columnist, she is also the author of St. Patrick’s Secrets. ( $16.95 / 295 pages / Cumberland House)
Finally, an intriguing, easily overlooked book has just been released entitled Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger. Edited by esteemed Hofstra Professor Maureen Murphy, the book was written in the 1840s by an American educator and reformer, Asenath Nicholson. Nicholson visited Ireland for 15 months to “investigate the condition of the Irish poor.” The result is a fascinating first-hand look at Famine Ireland from someone who received hospitality in a bleak time. ($32.95 / 394 pages / Dufour)
In 1999, a wonderful Irish story appeared in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly by a writer named Beth Lordan. Lordan is the critically acclaimed author of the novel August Heat as well as a short story collection And Both Shall Row, neither of which were set in Ireland.
Yet in Atlantic Monthly – and then in the 2002 edition of Best American Short Stories – Lordan was telling wonderful tales of Irish life, about locals as well as transplanted Americans.
Lordan herself teaches at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, where she lives with her husband. But she must visit Ireland quite often. Lordan’s Irish fiction has just been collected in an insightful “novel in stories” called But Come Ye Back.
Yes, the title is a quote from “Danny Boy.” More troubling still is that But Come Ye Back does indeed deal with an Irish immigrant who makes her way back to her beloved native home.
But hang in there. Lordan is no mordant sentimentalist. She is a clear-eyed writer whose eye for the subtlety of the Galway landscape and people is matched only by her masterful depiction of what seems to be a successful marriage.
Lordan’s protagonist is Mary Curtin, a young Irish nanny who met and fell in love with Lyle Sullivan, an Irish-American accountant. For three decades, Lyle proved to be far from easy as a husband. But he does secure a good life in the U.S. for Mary, as well as their two children.
Mary, of course, has contributed just as much to the family’s fortune. And she has a surprise in store for Lyle when he retires. She wants to move back to Ireland.
Lyle agrees, reluctantly. But in Galway, Lyle and Mary do not ease gently into a quiet retired life. Their marriage actually faces perhaps its toughest test. Lordan weaves a wonderful, complicated story, even if the “novel in stories” form is a bit cumbersome. ($23.95 / 288 pages / William Morrow)
Acclaimed Irish playwright and stand-up comedian Brendan O’Carroll – author of the bestselling Agnes Browne trilogy – is back with The Young Wan.
Agnes is back too, as a girl growing up in 1940s Dublin. We learn how Agnes and Marion became lifelong friends, overcoming obstacles in school, on the streets and even with boys. Filled with O’Carroll’s trademark wit, Agnes fans should be rejoicing once again. ($13 / 208 pages / Plume)
Two other new works of fiction, meanwhile, should satisfy readers with more literary leanings.
Eugene McCabe’s collection of 12 stories Heaven Lies About Us (talk about a title with a double meaning) looks closely at life in the Irish border counties, both in the present time as well as right after the famine. ($24.95 / 320 pages / Bloomsbury). Meanwhile, Michael C. White’s novel The Garden of Martyrs (due out in May) is based on actual events from the early 1800s among the Boston Irish, when two immigrants were persecuted and wrongly convicted of a heinous crime. ($24.95 / 368 pages / St. Martin’s Press)
Christopher Cahill, executive director of the Institute for Irish American Studies at CUNY, has edited a wonderful book of poems entitled Gather Round Me: The Best of Irish Popular Poetry. This slim but substantive volume is filled with familiar names such as Flann O’Brien and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, as well as a number of anonymous, traditional songs, poems, slices of verse and more.
Love, death, rebellion and emigration are among the themes we see here again and again. But as Cahill writes in his useful introduction: “The love of place, and the almost ritualistic telling over of place-names – of towns and townlands, rivers and streams, hills and mountains, counties and provinces – is a distinctively Irish concern and one that pervades the whole range of poems in this collection.” ($16 / 144 pages / Beacon Press)
Photographer Tom Quinn Kumpf has released a stunning book of his work entitled Ireland: Standing Stones to Stormont. The book is a neat mix of Irish myth and legend, as well as gorgeous photography of fields, roads, streams, animals and even a few notable personalities. The past strikingly merges with the present in both Kumpf’s words and images. ($39.95 / 144 pages /Devenish Press)
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