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The written word
Dan Barry
Teller of New York Stories
 Dan Barry has spent the better part of his career piecing together the torn lives that make up the New York City landscape. As a reporter for the New York Times’ “About New York” column, covering police and city politics since 1995, he has witnessed and written about many of the city’s collective tragedies, including the September 11th terrorist attacks. Prior to working at the Times, Barry spent eight years at the Providence Journal. There, he covered state government and organized crime and was a member of the newspaper’s investigative team that won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1994. He also won a George Polk Award and received a 2003 Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
In 1999, Barry was introduced to a series of personal tragedies, including the loss of his mother to lung cancer, followed shortly by his own diagnosis of tracheal cancer. An insightful and rarely self-referential writer, Barry used the opportunity to turn the tables on himself, making himself the focus of a treacherous form of writing – biography.
In his recent memoir, Pull Me Up, published by Norton this past year, Barry paints a striking picture of his childhood growing up in the New York Irish suburban enclave Deer Park, followed by a wrenching personal account of the life that followed. His story is brimming with eccentric neighbors, family UFO hunts, school bullies, and vivid details of the Eisenhower years, when women’s perms had “a chemical whiff.” Of course, what memoir wouldn’t be complete without romance, in Barry’s case, the somewhat timid, yet ultimately touching relationship with Mary Trinity, whom he met while attending St. Bonaventure and eventually married.
The product of a first-generation Irish father, a rowdy scholar with a penchant for drink, and an Irish mother who immigrated to New York from a farm in Ireland, Barry narrates his life with courage and sincerity. He and his wife live in Maplewood, New Jersey with their two adopted daughters.
Kevin Boyle
National Book Awardee
Detroit native Kevin Boyle, 44, nabbed one of the most prestigious awards in publishing in 2004 when he won the National Book Award for non-fiction for his riveting book Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age.
Not bad for a kid who grew up on Detroit’s east side, attended St. Clare of Montefalco Grade School in Grosse Pointe Park and later graduated from Austin Catholic Prep High School.
“I feel extraordinarily lucky,” Boyle told the Detroit Free Press. “I had no expectation that they were going to call my name. I’m really also excited that this will get the Sweet story more attention. Their story is so important; Detroit’s story is so important.”
Boyle is currently a history professor at Ohio State University. But he says his interest in Detroit has not abated. In fact, he said his own upbringing played a role in his decision to pursue the topic which ultimately won him the National Book Award.
“My neighborhood went through the process of racial change when I was a teenager,” he has said. “It was wrenching for a lot of reasons, and I wrapped up all those dynamics into the story.”
At the Center of Boyle’s book is the story of Ossian Sweet, a black doctor. In 1925, Dr. Sweet was trapped in his house with 10 other family members and friends. More than 800 white people gathered outside the Sweet home and began throwing rocks and making threats. People in the neighborhood were opposed to the family’s presence in the area.
Eventually, shots rang out from inside the Sweet home. One person in the white mob died and another was injured. Police later arrested everyone in the Sweet house and charged them with first-degree murder.
The apparent injustice beckoned famed attorney Clarence Darrow, who had taken part in the high-profile Scopes Monkey Trial. Darrow represented Sweet. The judge on the case, meanwhile, was Frank Murphy – an Irish-American, future Detroit mayor, governor and Supreme Court justice. The first Sweet trial was a mistrial because of a hung jury. The second ended with an acquittal. From this wrenching story, Kevin Boyle has spun an award-winning narrative which captures a pivotal moment in American history.
Boyle now lives in Bexley, Ohio with his wife Victoria and two children, Abby and Nan.
Jimmy Breslin
Still Working the Beat
Jimmy Breslin retired from writing regular columns for Newsday last year. And yet, the legendary Irish-American journalist is busier than ever.
Breslin is working on a short biography of Branch Rickey, the Queens native who worked for the Brooklyn Dodgers and brought Jackie Robinson into major league baseball in 1947.
Breslin is also planning to make a TV special about his most recent book, the very controversial The Church That Forgot Christ. In the book, Breslin traveled across the world chronicling the sexual abuse scandals which have consumed the Catholic Church. The book gained lots of attention, equally positive and negative. Either way, it showed that Breslin could still touch a nerve.
Breslin ended his run as a regular columnist for several reasons. First off, it was a tragic year for the Breslin family. His daughter, Rosemary, died last year after a long battle with blood disease. Breslin and his family (including wife Ronnie Eldridge, a former New York City Councilwoman) are still coping with this tragedy. A desire to do bigger projects, and the expiration of his Newsday contract also led Breslin to believe this was the time to stop the regular column.
A native of Ozone Park, Queens, Breslin has said that his dad went out for a pack of cigarettes one night when Jimmy was just 6 and never came back. Many say Breslin’s passion for the underdog is rooted in his mother’s early struggles.
Breslin won a Pulitzer Prize at the Daily News in 1986 and has written a dozen books, including the novel Table Money, a brilliant look at life among Irish union men. His 1973 novel World Without End, Amen chronicled the civil rights movements in both America and Northern Ireland.
In the mid-1990s, Breslin wrote I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me, which explored the columnist’s terrifying brain surgery. In 2001 he published the unforgettable Short, Sweet Life of Eduardo Guttierez, a brilliant look at the dark sides of Mexican immigration and New York politics.These days, Breslin is in fine health. So, he may be retired, but he won’t be going away anytime soon. “I’m still working,” he said in a recent interview. “There’s no difference in my life.”
Jon Carroll
Award-Winning Humorist
His bushy beard, clambering up the walls of his face, is not strong enough to muffle Jon Carroll’s laugh. It is of the infectious variety, and he likes to pass it on, mixed with a few nuggets of political rant and personal wisdom, in his daily column for the San Francisco Chronicle. His writing is varied. Sometimes it touches on the political (“here’s the lesson of the 20th century: Bombing people into submission doesn’t work”); often it is laced with traces of nostalgia, which he recognizes as “just a way of holding a pre-death memorial service.”
What his columns have in common is that often they seem to come from a place of great distance. “History teaches three pretty clear messages,” starts one of Carroll’s favorite pieces, “one is that all empires die.” The fatalist Carroll frequently enjoys pondering inevitability, political patterns and historical truths.
When he started at the Chronicle – a young idealist not yet through college – he edited the crossword puzzle and interviewed “third-rate celebrities.” Though he landed his own column in 1982, a series of editorial stints followed his initial employment. He has held positions at Rolling Stone, Rags, Oui, and The Village Voice. In 1979, he won the National Magazine Award. During his fifteen-year tenure at the Chronicle, Carroll has won several awards, “none of which,” he mourns, were “attached to any financial windfall.” Among those awards was one bestowed in 2004 from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
Carroll is also an avid collector of mondegreens (a mishearing of a popular phrase or song lyric). His most valuable mondegreenian gems can be found regularly in his column. Carroll lives in Oakland, California with his wife.
Carol Higgins Clark
Mystery Woman
 Carol Higgins Clark’s newest mystery, her eighth novel, Burned, is coming out this March, and her wide fan base is eagerly awaiting to read about the newest adventures of Regan Reilly, the Los Angeles-based private eye with a propensity for danger.
In Burned, Clark sends Reilly to Hawaii, visiting an old friend who has a new flame. Her friend sees this as a last chance to get together before Reilly’s upcoming wedding, but as usual, trouble finds Reilly. Burned contains Clark’s unique mix of quirky characters, devious plot twists, and clever humor that has been the trademark of her writing career.
Clark has been recognized on a number of occasions for her distinguished writing. Her novel Decked was nominated for both the Edgar and Agatha Awards, and she won the Audiophile’s Earphone Award of Excellence for Jinxed, which came out in 2002.
Her broad range of experience certainly has helped Clark when it comes to her writing career. Born in New York City, she attended college at Mount Holyoke. After receiving her BA, she moved on to study acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.
Her acting highlights include an appearance at New York’s Carnegie Hall in Wendy Wasserstein's play Uncommon Women and Others and she was the lead in the film A Cry in the Night, based on a book by her mother, famed author Mary Higgins Clark. Carol has also recorded all three novels she wrote with her mother and a number of her mother’s short stories and books.
Clark is certainly in touch with her Irish heritage. In fact, she set part of her fourth book, Twanged, on the west coast of Ireland, and she went to Galway and Dublin to research it and visit relatives. She can trace her Irish ancestry back to her great-grandparents from County Sligo and Mayo. She credits those genes for giving her the gift of storytelling. It’s certainly no mystery to her fans why she continues to be one of the most popular authors in America today.
Edward Conlon
Storytelling Cop
When Edward Conlon joined the New York Police Department, he knew what to expect. His father was with the NYPD and the FBI, and his uncle and great-grandfather were New York cops. Now Conlon shares his and their stories in Blue Blood, an epic work of non-fiction about what it means to dwell among the ranks of New York’s finest.
Conlon, who wrote the “Cop Diary” column in The New Yorker, was born in the Bronx in 1965, to an Irish-American family. After graduating from Harvard, Conlon worked as a freelance writer, and then for a social service agency whose mission was to appeal to the courts for leniency on behalf of certain gifted but troubled young offenders.
He soon realized that he was fascinated by crime and the criminal justice system, and he decided to become a cop. “I had two vocations, cop and writer, which called not only to me but to each other,” he says.
Conlon’s conviction that writing and police work were directly related only deepened over time. The building of a case was the creation of a real-life story, with characters, events and details that had to be told in a way that made sense to cops, lawyers, judges and juries.
“Ya gotta have a story,” as the old-timers said, and Conlon came to believe that he had one of his own to tell. The resulting Blue Blood, to quote Joseph Wambaugh (bestselling author who redefined police fiction with The Onion Field), “is the most stunning memoir ever written about the cop world.”
After the death of his namesake, Uncle Eddie, Conlon moved into Eddie’s apartment in the Bronx. He currently serves as a detective based in the 44th precinct in the South Bronx. He characterizes being a cop as gaining entry into “a drama as rich as Shakespeare.”
Michael Connelly
Crime Writer
Award-wining mystery writer Michael Connelly began his writing career as a journalist with various publications in Florida.
After reading the books of Raymond Chandler while still at University, he decided he wanted to be a writer. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1980, with a degree in journalism and creative writing, and soon found work as a journalist.
He was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for a story he did about the survivors of a major plane crash. This recognition led to a job with The Los Angeles Times, where he worked as a crime reporter. He got to know Los Angeles very well and had great access to information regarding crime and especially homicides.
Drawing from his experiences, his first novel, Black Echo was published in 1992 and won the Edgar award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. He introduced his lead character Harry Bosch, who became a common thread throughout many of his novels. Other Harry Bosch novels include The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde and City of Bones. In 2002, The New York Times named City of Bones a Notable Book of the Year.
Hollywood has shown a lot of interest in Connelly’s novels. The movie adaptation of his novel Blood Work was released in 2002, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. He has also enjoyed some success in television, as he was one of the writers and creators of Level 9, a TV show about a task force fighting cyber crime.
His next novel, The Closers, another Harry Bosch novel, is set to be released in May, 2005. Connelly is currently President of the Mystery Writers of America organization. He relocated back to Florida with his family, though Los Angeles remains the location for all of his novels.
Pat Conroy
Making Recipes for Life
Hankering after a new novel from the author of The Prince of Tides? Here’s the next best thing, The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life (Doubleday, $26) written with Suzanne Williamson Pollak.
The book is a chronicle of Conroy’s passion for cooking. (He won a 2001 James Beard Foundation award for an article in Gourmet magazine about an oyster roast). There are also autobiographical chapters that have little to do with cooking. In an interview with the New York Times, Conroy called the book “my disguised autobiography,” adding, “I never enjoyed writing anything more.”
In a 1995 interview with Irish America, Conroy said, “I love food. I am a good cook. I found some good recipes in Dublin, but someone told me something that moved me a great deal. They said when you’re oppressed and starving for 800 years, cuisine is one of the last things you think about.”
Conroy was born on October 26, 1945, in Atlanta, Georgia to a young career military officer from Chicago and a Southern beauty from Alabama, whom Conroy often credits for his love of language. He was the first of seven children.
He attended The Citadel military academy in Beaufort, South Carolina, upon his father’s insistence, and while still a student, wrote his first book, The Boo, as a tribute to a beloved teacher.
After graduation, Conroy taught English to underprivileged children in a one-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island, a remote island off South Carolina. He exposed the appalling conditions his students endured with The Water Is Wide (1972), which was made into the feature film Conrack, starring Jon Voigt. The autobiographical work, The Great Santini, which explores his relationship with his often abusive father, was published in 1976. It was later made into a movie starring Robert Duvall. The Citadel became the subject of his next novel, The Lords of Discipline. Following that, The Prince of Tides published in 1986 was made into a movie starring Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte. Beach Music (1995), Conroy’s sixth book, another bestseller, tells the story of Jack McCall, a Vietnam War veteran and contains many memorable lines including this one uttered by McCall: “As a country, Vietnam was not important; but as a wound, it was unbearable.”
Maureen Dowd
Pulitzer Prize-winning
Columnist for the New York Times and author of 'BushWorld'
By Dermot McEvoy
“I’ll have the Irish breakfast tea,” she says.
“You mean the English breakfast tea,” the waitress corrects.
“Whatever,” Maureen Dowd replies, smiling.
It is hard to believe that such a petite, charming woman could be viewed as a
shrew by not only conservatives because of her coverage of President Bush and
the Iraq war, but by liberals who have never quite forgiven Dowd for her
critique of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair.
The Republican National Convention is in town and Dowd is staying at the Four
Seasons Hotel – a remove from her working-class upbringing in Washington,
D.C.
Born in 1952, the youngest of five children, O’Dowd was brought up in a
Republican household – make that Irish Republican. Her mother’s parents
were from Mayo. Her father, Michael, immigrated to the U.S. from County Clare
in 1914. He joined the Washington D.C. police force and became inspector in
charge of Senate security.
“Dad used to like us to recite patriotic Irish poems. He’d keep a coin box
on the piano with green and white wrapping, to raise money to get the two
parts of Ireland back together, and when anyone would come in he’d say,
‘Come on, big shot, pony up the money,’” Dowd recalls with affection.
“My dad was the national president of the Hibernians. My mom was the
historian of the Hibernians. In fact, that’s how I was conceived, at a
Hibernian convention in Newark.” She leans forward to share the intrigue.
“My dad was jealous. Some other Hibernian was paying attention to my mom and
they had a big fight and he had to make up. So I was conceived at a Hibernian
convention in jealousy and rage.” A burst of laughter ends the story.
Dowd first visited Ireland with her family when she was about 20. She returned
on President Clinton’s first trip over. “That was so much fun and you know
I have to say that that was the only time I saw Clinton get all the love he
wants,” she says, adding, “You know he’s like the Grand Canyon of Need
and we were in Belfast and Van Morrison was there and just waves of love, and
deservedly. He deserved it. He got it. And I’ve never seen him that happy.
His face was just infused with this fantastic glow. Obviously, that’s the
way he had always wanted his whole presidency to be, but it just came that one
time in Ireland. That was a really great trip.”
Dowd’s journey to the Times and a Pulitzer started with 16 years of Catholic
education. “I went all the way through,” she says proudly; “a grade
school called Nativity, a high school called Immaculata, and then Catholic
University. So I’m totally convent bred.”
After graduation the trip to fame got a little bumpy. “I didn’t know what
I wanted to do,” Dowd admits, “so I got a job at the Washington Racquet
Club selling tennis balls. That went on for about a year until my parents
staged an intervention. They said, ‘We didn’t sacrifice to get you this
college degree so you could wear a tennis dress to work ever day.’”
Dowd’s brother, Kevin – named for the Irish patriot Kevin Barry – knew
the Metro Editor of the Washington Star and Dowd soon found herself working
the lobster shift as a “dictationist,” typing in stories from reporters in
the field. It was the time of Watergate and eventually she escaped the pool
and became a general reporter and a tennis columnist. After the Star folded
she worked for Time magazine for two years before being hired by Anna Quindlen
at the New York Times.
Eventually, Dowd worked her way up to being the Times’ White House
correspondent for the first President Bush. And as strange as it may seem
because of the critical columns she writes about the current president, Bush
Senior remains one of her biggest fans. “We have always had a good
relationship,” she says bluntly. “I don’t really have relationships with
politicians in that way, not in the way James Reston [of the New York Times]
used to [with JFK]. I don’t have that. I try to think of it as not
antagonistic, exactly. I just want to be the readers’ advocate. I don’t
get any special access to them and be friends with politicians at all. That
being said, as a White House reporter, he [the elder Bush] was always lovely
and gracious to me. And occasionally now he’ll write me notes.”
Just as Dowd is about to get down to the nitty-gritty of the Bush
administration, her assistant interrupts and tells her she has to get down to
Madison Square Garden to cover the convention.
It is not until after the election that Irish America again meets up with Dowd
and she picked up as if she never left. When asked if she was surprised by the
results of the election she admits that she wasn’t. “I thought President
Bush and Karl Rove held the whip hand throughout the election,” she says,
“making John Kerry dance to their tune. His timid, reactive campaign backed
up their assertions that he was timid and reactive. Also, W. and Dick Cheney were better at scaring voters to death. I knew that Karl Rove had succeeded in getting all those
millions of evangelicals – who regarded the election as a matter of eternity
– to the polls.”
With the beginning of his second term President Bush has begun to play musical
cabinet secretaries. What does it all mean? “For the second term,” says
Dowd, “Bush and Cheney are dispatching their toadies to the agencies to
quell dissent. They also want to extend their personal control over bureaucracies they thought had impeded their foreign policy. This crackdown
seems bizarre, since hardly anyone dared to disagree with them anyway and
there were plenty willing to twist the truth for them. W., who was the loyalty
enforcer for his father’s administration, is now the loyalty enforcer for
his own.”
Although she is hard on the Republicans, Dowd also has some “tough love”
advice for the Democrats. “I think they need to stop nominating
easy-to-stereotype, wooden Northeast liberals and get some candidates who can capture the music of history and the
pulse of the nation in their stump speeches,” she says. “Less windsurfing,
more wind at their back. Democrats have a narrative to tell of helping the
have-nots and the underprivileged and working class in society; certainly, they can talk about
values. With Dukakis, Gore and Kerry, they had bad messengers who were trying
to make themselves over in the middle of campaigning. They have to get a lot
tougher. After 9/11, presidential campaigns are more tests of manliness than
ever. And they have to choose candidates who are a lot tougher, and a lot more
witty and charming.”
And what kind of an agenda does Dowd foresee for the Bush administration in
the next several years? “Dark. Secretive. Conservative. Belligerent.
Unilateral. Drilling in Alaska, and in the Irish Sea, if they could figure out
a way to claim it.”
When informed she must be doing something right if both sides dislike her so
much, she replies in a soft, elusive voice, “The only difference is that
I’ve gone from Democratic readers going ‘Dear Media Whore’ to
conservative readers going ‘Dear Liberal Slut.’” She considers her
predicament before adding thoughtfully, “I always thought Democrats were
more genteel when they were mad at you, but they weren’t. They were just as
vicious as Republicans.”
When we met last September Dowd was just beginning to promote her book of
collected columns, Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk, which will be published
with additional columns in paperback by Berkley in March. Her book could
easily have been called Dowd’s World because her column is unique, not only
in its writing, but also its perspective. Unlike most columns about the
Beltway, hers are filled not only with opinion on the news, but with broad
strokes of humor.
With Dowd, staid is out. Her readers relish her cast of characters, wearing sobriquets as veneers – there’s President Bush (aka,
King George II, W., 43), Dick Cheney (Vice), and the ever popular Donald
Rumsfeld (Rummy). She readily admits to having an angle, or, as she puts it, a
“schtick.”
“Mine is to be right on the news,” she says, “and to try to be very
newsworthy.” When asked why she called it Bushworld, she replies, “They
[the Bush administration] created this other universe where everything is
backwards, the opposite of the way it is in real life. They’ll be putting
more pollution in the air and it will be the Clearer Skies Act. With Iraq, the
connection is between Iraq and Al Qaeda and it turns out the connection is
Iran and Al Qaeda. We’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight
them here, but then they’re coming here too!” She stops to laugh at the
inanity of it all. “So it’s a world, it’s like this whole universe,
where they never let in any information that doesn’t fit with their
preconceived notions.”
Jim Dwyer & Kevin Flynn
Recalling 9/11 and the Fight to Survive
Since the horrible events of September 11, 2001, hundreds of books have been written about how people around the world were affected by this tragedy.
But it was a pair of Irish-American New York Times reporters, Jim Dwyer, pictured left, and Kevin Flynn, right, who eventually produced what has been called perhaps the most detailed and intimate account of the attack on the twin towers. Their book, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, captures the heretofore unknown stories of ordinary people who took extraordinary steps to save themselves and others. Dwyer and Flynn have been hailed for setting a new standard in investigative reporting as they pose disturbing questions about New York’s response to such an emergency.
The title of the book comes from the exact amount of time that passed from the time the first plane hit the towers until they both crumbled.
Dwyer and Flynn interviewed hundreds of rescue workers and survivors for the book. They also read through thousands of pages of oral histories, phone calls, e-mail messages and radio transmissions.
Both Dwyer and Flynn are native New Yorkers. Dwyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, had already published a book about the first attack in 1993 on the World Trade Center entitled Two Seconds Under the World. He also co-authored Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted.
Dwyer’s reporting has taken him to Northern Ireland and, most recently, to war-torn Iraq.
Dwyer attended Fordham and Columbia University. His parents Phil and Mary were born in Kerry and Galway respectively. Dwyer and his wife Cathy live in New York with their daughters, Maura and Catherine.
Three of Flynn’s grandparents were born in Ireland. He was raised in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and attended St. Margaret of Cortona School, then Fordham Prep, Brown University and Columbia University.
Currently a special projects editor at the Times, Flynn has also worked for the Daily News, New York Newsday and the Stamford Advocate. He was the Times’ police bureau chief on 9/11, which put him in a special position to witness the unfolding events, as well as to grasp the impact the tragedy would have on New York’s uniformed rescue workers.
Ultimately, Dwyer and Flynn’s book will likely stand as the most authoritative version of the events of September 11.
Kevin Fagan
Chronicling the Homeless
He has been on the receiving end of death threats, he has walked through pools of blood along the streets of San Francisco, and most recently, Kevin Fagan is the man that has given a face to San Francisco’s homeless problem – considered by many to be the worst in the nation.
This year, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts not only to chronicle the city’s homeless, but also to offer solutions. His writings: gritty yet empathetic, is representative of his character. While he may joke about spending weeks living with hobos, nonchalantly drop a line about decomposing flesh, in the end he’s a reporter that cares. Of the homeless he’s interviewed, he explains, “they’re still people. And when you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you care about them.”
What started as a five-part series entitled “Shame in the City” for The San Francisco Chronicle soon became a weekly column. Fagan has moved on from covering homelessness in the Golden Gate City to examining it all over the country. In 2004, he also received the Excellence in Urban Journalism Award.
Prior to his 12 years at the Chronicle, Fagan worked for BBC Radio in London and The Oakland Tribune. His career has included coverage of the Bobby Sands hunger strike, the Maze Prison escapees, and an interview with Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams. He has witnessed five prison executions and covered several others, including that of Timothy McVeigh, and he covered many of the biggest breaking stories in recent years, from the Sept. 11 terror attacks at Ground Zero to the Columbine High massacre. His news features have ranged from tales of haunted houses and UFOs to extensive profiles of troubled youths and infighting on Indian reservations over casino cash. He has won more than 60 national and regional awards in his career, including prizes from Best of the West, California Newspaper Publishers’ Association, AP Managing Editors, National Association of Black Journalists, National Enterprise Foundation and local press clubs.
Kevin is fourth-generation Irish-American, with roots hailing back to County
Meath.
Nick Flynn
Life on the Streets
“Sometimes I’d see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up.”
In 1987, the 27-year-old Nick Flynn, a would-be poet, was working in a homeless shelter in Boston when his father came in off the streets searching for a warm meal and shelter. It was the second time Nick had met his father since Nick was two and his parents split.
Nick’s mother committed suicide when Nick was 22 and he dropped out of school and battled alcoholism and rootlessness, unconsciously mimicking his father, who was making tables out of driftwood, passing forged checks, serving a two-year sentence, driving a cab, and using his charm to bounce from one friend’s couch to another.
The facts alone are enough to make Flynn’s memoir a bestseller, but the writing, at turns lyrical, funny, unsentimental and utterly devastating is what make Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase his father uses for life on the streets) an unforgettable book.
In deft strokes Flynn paints his youth, his mother’s boyfriends, the letters from his “crazy’ father, and what led him and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other.
“No one who reads Another Bullshit Night in Suck City will ever walk through a city in the same way again. If I say that Flynn’s book ranks with Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, I mean it as the highest possible praise,” says Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours.
Today, Nick Flynn is the award-winning author of Some Ether and Blind Huber. He teaches at the University of Houston.
Rick Gosselin
Sports Hall of Famer
Rick Gosselin has been called “one of the greatest football writers in America,” so it’s appropriate that we got a letter from his uncle Patrick Costello of Bloomfield Hills, pointing out that Rick was inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame in 2004.
Gosselin received the Dick McCann Memorial Award (named for Pro Football Hall of Fame’s first director) for long and distinguished reporting of pro football, on August 7, in Canton, Ohio.
“Rick’s thoroughness, his sources and his organization are unparalleled. He’s the writer that everybody looks at come draft time. I don’t know how he sleeps before the draft. His knowledge of the draft is unprecedented. He knows more than some scouts,” said John McClain of the Houston Chronicle who is the president of the Professional Football Writers of America. NFL teams use Gosselin’s ‘special teams’ formula to judge their squads.
Gosselin, whose grandmother Mary (King) Costello was raised in Clifden, Co. Galway, graduated from Michigan State University in 1972 with a degree in journalism. He joined the United Press International for two years and later transferred to New York City to cover the New York Giants and coordinate NFC coverage for the wire service. In 1990 he moved to the Dallas Morning News.
In his career, Gosselin has covered the summer and winter Olympics, the World Series, NCAA Final Four, the World Cup, and 21 Super Bowls. A Detroit native, he was named the Missouri Sports Writer of the Year in 1980 by The National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters, and has won writing awards from the Associated Press, the Professional Football Writers of America and the Dallas Press Club. Gosselin also serves as a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Selection Committee. His older brother Thomas Michael was featured in the September issue of San Francisco magazine as one of Northern California’s ten top attorneys.
Pete Hamill
Downtown Lover
As a small child walking across the bridge from Brooklyn with his mother, Pete Hamill thought New York City looked just like Oz. In Downtown (Little, Brown and Company; December 1, 2004; $23.95), a mixture of history, memoir, and pure appreciation, Hamill lovingly explains why the city still looks like Oz.
Born in Brooklyn, the oldest of seven children of Irish immigrants from Belfast, Hamill left school at 16 to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He then joined the Navy, where he completed his high school education. Later, using the G.I. Bill, he attended Mexico City College, studying painting and writing.
In 1960, Hamill went to work as a reporter for the New York Post. A long career in journalism followed. He has been a columnist for the New York Post, the Daily News, and New York Newsday, and has won many journalistic awards. He has covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. From his base in New York he has also covered murders, crime, the police, along with the great national disturbances of the 1960s. His work has also been published in all the major magazines, including Esquire, New York, and The New Yorker.
At the same time, Hamill has pursued a career as a fiction writer, producing eight novels and two collections of short stories. His 1997 novel, Snow in August, was on the New York Times bestseller list for four months, and has been published in more than a dozen foreign editions. His memoir, A Drinking Life, was on the same New York Times list for 13 weeks. He has published two collections of his journalism, a book about the relationship of tools to art, and a book about New York City, along with Why Sinatra Matters, an extended essay on the music of the late singer and the social forces that made his work possible. In 1999, Harry N. Abrams published his lavishly illustrated biography of the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. He is now working on another novel, and on an art book about the illustrator Thomas Nast.
Hamill is married to the Japanese journalist, Fukiko Aoki. He has two grown daughters, one a poet, the other a photographer for the Arizona Republic in Phoenix. He and his wife divide their time between New York and Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Nora Roberts
Pragmatic Romantic
Ultimately, Nora Roberts is a romantic. From her remote Maryland home, situated atop a hill, she considers love.
“When my parents died, they had been married for 62 years. Relationships can have happy endings, but they take effort,” Nora told Irish America in an interview. The happy ending is an important theme for
Nora.
“At least in that bubble of fiction, good will overcome evil.” Nora set out to explore marriage and growth, and the hard-earned happy ending, when she launched her In Death series, a set of futuristic romance novels written under the pseudonym J.D. Robb. While the story in each book has a momentum all its own, the relationship between Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her husband Rourke develops over several books.
Nora’s current marriage reads like one of her novels. When she first met Bruce Wilder, he was her carpenter. She had hired him to build a set of bookshelves.
“It’s a great way to meet a guy,” she chuckled, “I honestly didn’t pay any attention to him. I had been a single parent for about a year when I met him.” In spite of the fact that she made a career out of love, when Nora met Bruce, she maintained, “romance was not on my radar.” After he finished her shelves, he asked her out, and the rest is, well, Harlequin material. Though her first marriage didn’t end as happily, Nora’s belief in love was not to be shaken. It is this facet that distinguishes her from the starry-eyed dreamer endemic in her profession. Nora Roberts’ brand of romanticism is pragmatic.
“It is hard, and it doesn’t always work out, and there aren’t always happy endings the first time – or even the second, but we are creatures of hope. Why do we do it again if we don’t believe it can work? If we don’t do it again that’s very sad.”
In addition to her lustrous career (she has had over 115 New York Times Bestsellers, including one of her most recent books, The Calhouns: Catherine, Amanda, and Lilah), Nora is thankful for her two sons, Jason and Dan, whom she credits, along with her four older brothers, for her understanding of men. “We may be human, but we are different species.” Roberts visits Ireland regularly and maintains a home in County Clare.
Helen Scully
Writing about Family
First-time novelist Helen Scully was published by the Penguin Group last year. Loosely based on the life of her great-grandmother, Regina Rapier Marston, In the Hope of Rising Again has been described as a “brilliant social novel” as well as an “elegant and accomplished first novel.”
Scully tells the story of Regina Morrow, the daughter of a Confederate veteran, Colonel Riant, and her family. She explores the trials and tribulations facing the family after the Civil War. Settled in the town of Mobile, Alabama, the Riant family is extremely affluent and her father pretty much has control of the town, thanks to his endeavors in the newspaper business. Regina’s mother, meanwhile, has control of the family and rules with an iron fist, while her brothers engage in less than model behavior. Regina marries entrepreneur Charles Morrow to escape her family. She faces the greatest challenge when the depression hits and her family faces financial ruin. The novel explores themes such as life and death, love and family.
Scully is a graduate of Brown University. Born in Norfolk, Virginia in1977, she worked in publishing in New York for a period following her graduation. She moved to Barcelona in 2001 where she wrote for the magazine Barcelona Metropolitan and has since moved to New Orleans, Louisiana. Scully traces her Irish roots back to the 1800’s. Her grandmother was from a line of Collins who came to New York from County Westmeath around 1798 and her paternal grandfather was from a line of Scullys who emigrated from Cork around 1847.
Living down South, she enjoys the atmosphere and way of life for writing and she is currently working on a detective story set in New Orleans.
Kevin Starr
California’s Chronicler
Kevin Starr’s day is invariably busy; parts of it are dedicated to pontificating the California dream, some to rummaging through piles of newspapers, a great deal to reading. This, of course, is when he is not teaching history courses at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles on the American West, and Roman Catholicism. These are acts performed in between articles, chapter submissions, and manuscripts, in between answering phone calls to reporters demanding his take on the California recall, the gold rush, O.J. Simpson, and every and any facet of life touching on California. He is, after all, the country’s leading expert on the subject.
Somehow, Starr’s mind is able to grasp every cranny of California’s rich and extensive history, is able to visualize the narrative of California’s lust, and how it embodies the broader “American Dream.” It is no wonder Atlantic Monthly characterized the breadth of his scholarship as “breathtaking.” Last year, he completed a seven-volume series with his latest book, Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003. In his latest creation, he recalls some of the most memorable events of the past ten years, from the Heaven’s Gate suicides to the recent gubernatorial ordeal. His writing has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and gold and silver medals from the Commonwealth Club of California.
It is no surprise that so knowledgeable and didactic a figure as Starr would also serve as California’s State Librarian, a post he’s held for over ten years. He is also CEO of the California Library Services Board, and serves on the Smithsonian Library Advisory Board. He has published articles and reviews in several publications, including Vogue, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. He is a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times, and previously had a daily column for the San Francisco Examiner. He has also acted as a marketing consultant serving clients from The Asia Foundation, to the Bank of America and California Energy Company.
Kevin Starr divides his time between Los Angeles and San Francisco. He is married with two daughters and five grandchildren.
John Tierney
Big City Writer
He’s not averse to making enemies. In fact, John Tierney seems to welcome them. When he wrote “The Big City” column for The New York Times, he goaded all the staples of the Times readership. The environmentalists weren’t too happy with the piece “Recycling Is Garbage” that ran in the Times magazine, and Rosie O’Donnell is still smarting from the time he dressed up as a homeless person outside her mansion, forcing her to call the police. The prank was pulled to prove a point about liberal hypocrisy, following a complaint O’Donnell made to Mayor Rudy Giuliani for clearing the homeless off the streets. In spite of his proclivity for making a nuisance, critics and fans agree that John Tierney is one hell of a writer. In a profile written for The American Prospect, Chris Mooney wrote, "Tierney is clearly a talented and inventive writer. . . . He seldom seems at a loss for unconventional ways of promoting his ideas."
Since 2002, when the Times promoted Tierney to Washington Bureau Chief, he has become an equal-opportunity satirist, jabbing right and left in his lonely boxing match against big government. Though he may have co-authored the self-help parody God Is My Broker: A Monk-Tycoon Reveals the 7 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth with Christopher Buckley, Tierney does have a serious side. He has won several awards for his news stories, including the Washington Monthly Journalism Award in 1982, for a story on the ill-fated nuclear airplane, and the American Institute of Physics – United States Steel Foundation Science Writing Award, for a story on equally ill-fated perpetual motion machines. In 1988 he won the American Association for the Advancement of Science/Westinghouse Science Journalism Award for a cover story in Newsweek, “The Search for Adam and Eve.”
Prior to working at the Times, Tierney freelanced for The Atlantic, Esquire, New York magazine, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Washington Monthly, Playboy, Outside, National Geographic Traveler, Vogue, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, writing hard news and feature stories, as well as humor.
Tierney was born into a large Irish Catholic family with a penchant for moving. Though they started in a suburb of Chicago, the Tierneys ended up in Pittsburgh via Indiana, Minneapolis, South America and Spain.
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