A looks at books - Irish food and fiction

Call of the Lark
By Maura Mulligan

Maura Mulligan is perhaps best known to the Irish community in New York for her works as a dancer and actor at the Irish Arts Center, and as the founder of the Irish language school An Scoil Gaelige.

In Call of the Lark, her atmospheric and heartfelt new memoir, she conjures an Ireland and a way of life that may be as irretrievably lost to us now as Atlantis.

Starting life as a servant girl in a big house in Ireland, Mulligan sailed to America at the tender age of 17 where she soon answered a higher calling, entering a Franciscan convent to become a nun.
In the 1960s the reforms of Vatican II were only very slowly being implemented, and the preeminence of the Church in the life of the Irish was still paramount.

For Mulligan, a comely country girl with a reverence for God, church leaders were representatives of an authority that was never to be questioned. Her portrait of her own timidity in their presence is instructive, as is her slowly growing awareness that the life of a nun was not for her.

Other portraits in the book are unforgettable. Mulligan carries the wounds of her early childhood in Ireland with her for decades, the book makes clear, only to see them emerge in therapy years later.

One particular act of shocking cruelty by her own mother may have contributed to her long courtship with authority figures and her eventual decision to step out of their shadow.

Call of the Lark is the call of a holy spirit, Mulligan’s own as it happens, which as often happens takes years to find its voice and make its wishes known. But the delight of the book and her tale is that she has the wisdom to follow its promptings and step into herself at last. Mulligan’s tale is the nation’s, really.

Greenpoint Press.

The Dream of the Celt
By Mario Vargas Llosa

Irish patriot Roger Casement’s brief but brilliant life has inspired generations of scholars, activists, political leaders and, most crucially for his lasting legacy, artists.

It was Casement’s compassion for the oppressed people of the world –which must have found its origins in his own experience of oppression as a discreetly closeted homosexual at the turn of the 19th century – that got him into trouble.

When Casement dared to draw a parallel between the oppressed people of the Belgian Congo and the Amazon with the present condition of the pre-Easter Rising Irish he attracted the attention of the British authorities.

Witnessing the abuses meted out on colonized people first hand and shocked by their savagery, Casement eventually traded theory for practice and became involved in the cause of Irish freedom that ultimately led to his imprisonment and execution. 

For decades Ireland has refused to give this martyr for freedom his due because he came with baggage they didn’t want to acknowledge (he was gay). British intelligence, who were themselves known to harbor a few gay men in their lineups, ruthlessly exploited Ireland’s public morality to prevent Casement’s legend or activities from inspiring others.

As is so often the case with our most inspiring champions, it was non-Irish authors who understood and celebrated his challenge first. In The Dream of the Celt Mario Vargas Llosa restores this ahead of his own time figurehead to history and literature, where he deservedly belongs.

FSG, $27.

Flavors of Ireland: Celebrating Grand Places and Glorious Food
By Margaret Johnson

Gradually the Irish are realizing that the reputation of their home cooking skills has surpassed their near neighbors in Britain.

Right on cue there’s been a glut of genuinely sought after cookbooks to celebrate traditional Irish cooking and baking, and Flavors of Ireland is an example of the kind of modern Irish cookbook flying off the shelves internationally.

Margaret Johnson’s new book reflects the new enthusiasm for Irish cuisine and its signature elements.
With its emphasis on fresh and seasonal ingredients, it reminds readers that Ireland has a very distinctive food culture thanks to its geography, climate and unique history.

All of the familiar elements of Irish cooking are included in the new book: beef, lamb, and insanely rich dairy produce take pride of place alongside smoked, cured and spiced fish and meat.

But the book also takes time to remember other crucial Irish cooking ingredients like barley, wheat and rye too. For the weeknight hobbyist to the most sophisticated gourmet, Johnson’s knowledgeable book is sure to appeal to all comers.

Ambassador International, $19.99.

A look at books - Irish history and biographies

Oscar’s Shadow
By Eibhear Walsh

After his imprisonment and death, poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde continued to be a visible presence in popular culture in Ireland in a way that did not happen in England.

James Joyce had a lot to do with it. He wisely read Wilde’s sexuality and his art as challenges to the dominant political and moral hegemony of the British Empire (bolstering his own fight with official Ireland in the process).

For Ireland’s benighted writers Wilde became a standard bearer, a patron saint and a battering ram against officialdom in all its forms, which had the unintended effect of keeping him current, in a way that simply didn’t happen in Britain.

There Wilde had been imprisoned and made an example of.  No one imagined that they had actually added to his legend.  In England Wilde was a gay man -- in fact he was the gay man (the image that would define the stereotype for generations after) -- but in Ireland he was also the dissident and the patriot, which rehabilitated his reputation faster.

Walsh’s fascinating and meticulously researched new book examined unpublished archival material, and delves into a wealth of Irish critical studies and dramatizations of Wilde’s life and sexuality.  As a father who was also a homosexual, as a Anglo Irish writer who was unmistakably nationalist, as an aristocrat who was also marginalized to the outer limits of society, Wilde has been a mirror that an anxious postcolonial Ireland gazed into in search of its selfhood.

His legend will endure, as will his challenge.

Cork University Press, $50.

A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver
By Mark K. Shriver

Is there anything more miraculous than a genuinely good man? Or more mysterious, frankly? For years writer Mark K. Shriver has grappled with the inspirational legacy of his father, and this book is the expression of a grateful son.

Sarge, as he was known, lived an incident filled life. He had served in the navy in World War II. With his brother in law John F. Kennedy he started the Peace Corps.

He was the architect of President Johnson’s War on Poverty campaign. He served as ambassador to France. In 1972 he was a vice presidential candidate and in 1976 he ran for president.

Sarge was also married to Eunice Kennedy Shriver for 56 years, raising five children. Both were deeply committed to their family and their Catholic faith.

In sharp contrast to the conservative Christianity that has come to the fore in recent decades, Sarge saw his faith as a call to service to help the poor. He saw a continuum between his political life and his advocacy. His faith was a call to service, not a call to arms.

But to Mark Shriver he was simply dad. From a young age he was aware of his father’s standing on the political stage. His family was revered but it was also scrutinized and criticized.

A Good Man is his own estimation of his father, a love letter of sorts and an astounded thank you for encountering such a soul.

Henry Holt. $24.

Banished Babies
By Mike Milotte

Much has been written about the children abused by priests and about the tens of thousands of women condemned to indentured servitude in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, but what about Ireland’s once lucrative baby export industry?

The extend to which the Irish church and state stood side by side in organizing the export of thousands of Irish children in the 1950s is a tale to make your blood boil.

These helpless infants were not being sent off to well-to-do families in the U.S. In fact, there was a wealth of evidence to show that many of the children the church exported were being sent to people whose suitability as parents had not been vetted. Often they went to parents who had been rejected
previously by America’s own child welfare services.

But these babies were still sent out, and even when the alarm was raised the response was to do nothing. A child’s welfare during the most dominant years of church influence in Ireland in the 1950s mattered less than ensuring there was no bad publicity.

This shattering and scrupulously, even passionately, researched book brings us face to face with our own past. It will shock and infuriate all who read it as it uncovers the hidden truth about the nation’s utterly sordid past.

New Island, $22.