Looks at Books - Joseph P Kennedy, Notre Dame and Irish recipes

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
By David Nasaw
 
You can’t understand the American 20th century without contemplating the Irish American family whose epic rise in many ways defined it. In David Nasaw’s magisterial study of Joe Kennedy, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, he explores the hardheaded pragmatism that was Kennedy’s central characteristic.
 
It can be difficult to remember from this standpoint in history that Joe Kennedy’s rise was a rags to riches story. But Kennedy himself never forgot.
Along the way to riches he encountered prejudice, discrimination and exclusion at every turn. These were the social and political barriers to an upstart Irish American that he overcame through smarts, entrepreneurship and self-belief.
 
Kennedy was a much more complex man than many historians have allowed to date, and in Nasaw’s book a complete portrait emerges of the man who went on to found the most powerful political dynasty of the 20th century.
 
Kennedy, Nasaw informs us, was never the bootlegger that some have suggested. What he was was a far seeing businessman who made millions from his own ingenuity.
 
Anticipating the Great Crash of 1929, for example, he liquidated his stocks and survived the Depression with his fortune intact. By the 1950s he was one of the richest meant in the world.
 
He was also, crucially, an attentive and loving father, and his passion for securing his families future in some ways shaped their political legacy too. Kennedy had raised his family to be comfortable in front of newsreels, and he coached his children (especially Jack) on how to speak on television.
 
Tragically he lived long enough to witness the assassinations of his two sons John Fitzgerald and Robert Kennedy, but he also understood that his family legacy had been secured, which was the principle that dove him throughout his life and career.
 
Nasaw presents a portrait of a devoted Irish father whose life’s work was to transform not only his family’s fortunes but also the world’s.

Penguin, $40

 

Notre Dame’s Happy Returns: Dublin, The Experience, The Game
By Brian O’Conchubhair and Susan Mullen Guibert

Thirty five thousand Irish Americans descended on Dublin for the Emerald Isle Classic football game between Notre Dame and Navy on September 1 of this year. But the relationship between Notre Dame and Ireland goes back much further.

In this handsomely produced book of photographs from the event, photographer Matt Cashore has selected nearly 200 of favorite images in large format pictures that capture the sights and sounds of that made the event so significant for both visitors and locals alike.
 
The book also underlines the university’s commitment to scholarship though the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, which seeks to strengthen its ties to Ireland.
 
This is a remarkably illustrated portrait of the ancestral homeland, but it’s a living link and one that celebrates the diaspora’s achievements and enduring ties.
 
In the excitement surrounding the big game the bonds between the old world and the new world are renewed and this portrait captures that important moment for all future generations.

Notre Dame Press, $38

Gimme the Recipe
By Sheila Kiely

The title of this brilliant new Irish cookbook acknowledges the way most of us actually cook now – impatiently, and with an eye on the clock. But these easy to assemble Irish dishes are surprisingly sophisticated under the hood.
 
The avalanche of new Irish cookbooks in recent years are startling international food writers with their breadth of reference and popularity, but perhaps more than that they are surprising because they actually even exist. Until fairy recently Irish cuisine was not something most international food writers had even heard of.
 
All of that is changing with a burgeoning Irish cooking scene that’s producing more and more bona fide stars. Kiely’s new cookbook is a winner because you’ll find yourself returning to it more frequently than the high-toned fare that captures the attention of reviewers, if not their hearts.
 
Kiely has written the book for ordinary people in a rush (sound familiar?) and she helpfully divides it into three sections, which are roughly What’s for Dinner Tonight, Baking Day and Party Day. 
Kiely knows how to produce an authentically delicious Irish spread, and after reading this book you’ll do likewise. It’s unpretentious, approachable and the results speak for themselves. Highly recommended.
 
Mercer Press, $29.95

A look at Irish books - from comedy and Typhoid Mary to history and more

Wacky Eire
By Geraldine Comiskey

Ireland is the acknowledged home of surrealism and Geraldine Comiskey (a roving reporter for the Sunday World) often has occasion to encounter it at its source. 

Having a journalistic resume that includes getting set on fire by stuntmen, dancing on the wings of a World War II bi-plane (well, who hasn’t?) and joining a circus trapeze troupe, she’s clearly ready for anything.

Ireland in Comiskey’s book is a magical place where all manner of weirdness awaits you down almost very boreen, so in a way her job is an ideal one, scouring the nation in search of fun.

Her book is an eye-popping procession of dodgy faith healers, rural swingers, ghost hunters, GAA players, all of Irish life really. Gifted with a never say die spirit and an uncanny ability to find herself at the center of the wackiest stories, she’s an ideal guide to the books theme and this is one of the moist singular books of its kind you’re ever likely to read about its subject.

Dufour, $22.95.

Fever

Mary Mallon was called a lot of things in her time, but she is known best to history as Typhoid Mary. It was an unfortunate moniker for the poor Irish immigrant woman who had traveled on her own to a new life in America, where she was to discover many new things about herself. Among the most employable discoveries she made was her remarkable talent for cooking.

In Mary Beth Keane’s new novel, Mallon’s life is imaginatively recreated in an act that seems determined to rescue her demonized subject from history. The writer looks behind the headlines to the individual life and the struggles Mallon contended with.

Working as a cook in upper class kitchens, Mallon unwittingly infected multiple people with typhoid, which eventually led to the discovery that there could be such a thing as an “asymptomatic carrier” (a person who carried the disease without becoming infected with it).

In order to contain an outbreak, Mallon was sent by the Department of Health to North Border Island, where she was held in quarantine from 1907 to 1910.

Along the way she became a legend, and this book seeks to rescue her from the headlines by reminding us that she was also a person, not simply a carrier of disease. Keane has crafted a remarkable narrative from a fascinating and ultimately heartbreaking tale.

Scribner, $26.

Lola’s Secret
By Monica McInerney

If you have grown up in a feuding family (and if you’re Irish that more of a certainty than not) the last thing you’d want is for some do-gooder relative to concoct stratagems to bring you and your warring relations to the same table.

But in Lola’s Secret, by bestselling Dublin based author Monica McInerney, the heroine can’t help herself. At 84 she’s still determined to exercise her talent for creating truces among long battling families.

Her latest scheme involves inviting a number of mystery guests to stay at a local hotel – guests who have their reasons not to spend Christmas with their loved ones.

If this sounds contrived, well it is, but it is also effective too. And the woman who breaks her heart to make everything right for other people discovers that she’s not above experiencing a little healing of her own. McInerney’s addresses the occasional stuckness and the obstinance of family dynamics and she reveals just how much can change for better with a little push.

Ballantine, $15.

Smashing H-Block
By F. Stuart Ross

H-Block. Even the name is like a talisman that takes you right back to the darkest days of The Troubles in the North. In F. Stuart Ross’s study he offers a political history of the Irish Republican struggle against criminalization from 1976 to 1982.

These men were not terrorists. They were soldiers defying an occupation, and their struggle eventually culminated in the hunger strikes that were a turning point in the long war.

Ross insists that it was not just the prisoners themselves but also the wider activism of the grassroots movement outside the prisons that reshaped the Republican struggle and revitalized its ambitions.

Ross is a Derry based academic who reminds us that through their political activism ordinary people, the friends and relations of those “inside” had a profound effect on the emerging political consensus that was built during the darkest years of The Troubles and would change the debate thereafter.

University of Chicago Press, $34.95.

Look at books - Irish artists, fiction and history

Prodigals And Geniuses

By Brendan Lynch

The Irish love a good pub within walking reach and Ireland’s most gifted artists and thinkers have been no exception. As Paris has it’s Left Bank and New York has its Upper West Side, for decades Dublin’s bohemian quarter has been centered around Baggot Street and Leeson Street, fringed by the Grand Canal.

Among it’s familiars were four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature and nearly every major Irish writer of the 19 century, including Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and even Samuel Beckett.

Along the way Lynch conjures long lost Dublin like a magician. He never forgets how proud the capital city is of its distinguished writers and he never forgets how disdainfully it usually treated them when they actually lived there.

Lynch clearly loves his subjects and this is no more apparent than when he disccuses playwright Brendan Behan. “We’ve a lot to thank the British for,” Behan tells the author one morning in Dublin in 1958. “Did you ever see such handsome houses or squares? As my bardic neighbor John Montague might say, you can feel the rhythm. Look at those railings. And the granite steps dancing in the sun, wouldn’t they make your granny skip?”

Love for the locality and the mad collection of intellectuals, chancers and hangers on that assembled there once, and still assemble there now, animates every page of this deeply affectionate, brilliant and brilliantly gossipy book.

Dufour Editions, $31.95.

Cold Eye Of Heaven

By Christine Dwyer Hickey

In novelist Christine Dwyer Hickey’s new book we meet 75-year-old Dubliner Farley, an old man at the close of his days reflecting over the events that shaped him.

It’s quite a trick to peel away the layers of experience to dig to the root of her subject and reveal what makes him tick, but Dwyer Hickey is equal to it. Along the way she recreates a vanished Dublin, it’s sights and sounds and it’s magical vernacular, in a conjuring trick that will beguile you from the first page. (Christine Dwyer Hickey will read from and sign copies of Cold Eye Of Heaven at The Irish Arts Center at 7:30 PM on Tuesday, September 24).

It’s instructive to watch how regret can grow and take over a life until it’s all that remains of a person, and Dwyer Hickey shows us how loneliness can be the outcome of a poor choice, and one that spreads around a life like fog.

Dwyer Hickey also has the skill to take her time, offering a leisurely portrait of a man in lyrical prose that creates his world and his legacy so vividly you’ll think that all that separates you from him is a page. This is ambitious work, elegantly crafted.

Atlantic Books, $7.99.

Overcoming Violence

By Johnston McMaster

Ireland’s history, even in recent times, has been ferociously violent. Over centuries a cycle of outrage and revenge has characterized the seemingly endless conflict between warring traditions intent on giving no quarter.

What to do in a stalemate that cannot ever be won? And what of Christianity, that promotes peace but has shown itself to be all to quick to add kindling to long simmering resentments? Those questions have exercised minds for centuries.

In Overcoming Violence author McMaster explores the roots of the sectarian violence in Ireland, wresting the message of compassion and love from the destructive theology of the Old Testament.

In particular he laments the Irish myth of redemptive violence, which was all too popular with both sides in the Easter Rising and the Irish Civil war. Nothing good comes from anger and insult and McMaster wants to reminds us of the fact. Bad theology cannot be an excuse for more violence.

So what is strong enough to take the place of a culture of violence centuries in the making? A new value system, McMaster argues, and a new ethics based on non-violence that includes peace and compassion. We don’t just need to demilitarize our society; we need to do the same with our mindsets and spirituality.

Faith offers the most devastating critique of violence, and it can only work when it counters the violent theology and God that has been carefully but erroneously erected in Ireland over four centuries.
Columba Press, $26.95.

Looks at Books - New books reviewed for your consideration

Fighting Tuesdays
Edited By Emily Firetog and Declan Meade

FOURTH year, or transition year as its also known, is the much beloved year bookended by two fearful exams in the Irish school system. For students it’s the year when you can relax a bit and begin to discover your teenage identity finally. If you’re lucky it’ll be one of the happiest of your life too.
In Fighting Tuesdays the Stinging Fly Press invited students in that age bracket to submit original short stories, 24 of which have been selected for this book.
What makes this one worth your time is the remarkable sophistication in evidence in these pages. These stories aren’t just powerful; they’re a timely portrait of modern Ireland.
Spanning the great themes of friendship, love, bullying, drugs, alcohol, football and finding yourself, the humor and the dialogue crackle with the fierce urgency of youth itself.
Dufour, $15.95.

Setting the Truth On Fire: The Inside Story of the Bloody Sunday Campaign
By Julieann Campbell

IT took 18 years and 28 families to uncover the truth of what happened on Bloody Sunday, that lamentable day that changed the course of history in the North, but the sheer injustice of those 14 shocking killings would provide their inspiration in years to come.
United by their grief and outrage over the killings these families, who were in the beginning mostly strangers to each other, met and started a campaign for a new investigation into the shootings and for the exoneration of the victims.
Derry woman Julieann Campbell is the niece of the youngest victim, Jackie Duddy. A journalist and award winning poet, she was press officer for the Bloody Sunday families and saw their struggle from the inside, resulting in one of the most illuminating portraits of the campaign yet written.
It took almost two decades, but that determined campaign ended with Lord Saville’s historic report that found the British Army’s actions on the day “unjustified” and “unjustifiable.” Campbell’s book is a testament to their unflagging courage, but it reminds us too that what motivated them most was love.
Dufour, $24.95.

The Chosen
By Arlene Hunt

Irish writer Arlene Hunt makes the business of crafting a terrific new thriller look easy. Her latest introduces us to Jessie Conway, a hard working teacher at a local high school who unwittingly becomes the target of a serial killer.
Brilliantly crafted from the beginning, Hunt makes her heroine likeable and tough, which makes what happens next all the more involving. Psychotic killers are no match for the power of love and hope and so Hunt sets the stage for a showdown that is as riveting as it is believable.
There’s a cinematic sweep to Hunt’s work that suggests a bidding war may be in her future, but in the meantime you should acquaint yourself with one of the most interesting new voices to have emerged in thrillers in recent years.
Dufour, $21.95.

Just Follow the Floodlights: The Complete Guide to League of Ireland Football
By Brian Kennedy

IN 1921 the Irish weren’t just founding the Republic they were founding a national football team. Ninety-one years on that league is still going strong.
Forty-seven teams have comprised the League, and each has produced its own storied history. Ireland has always produced a surplus of eccentric characters, local color and victories against all the odds and this handsomely illustrated book is a time capsule that brings the fondest hopes of generations of players and fans back to life.
Dufour, $29.95.

1798: Tomorrow The Barrow’s We’ll Cross
By Joe Murphy

WHAT could be more Irish than the tale of a family shattered by divided loyalties? In this case it’s the tragic generation of 1798 when that all out and disastrous rebellion tears at the national fabric, with consequences that will be felt for centuries.
Joe Murphy’s enthusiasm for the period and for the men and women who lived and died during it leaps off every page of his new novel, a swashbuckling romance filled with last stands and epic battles.
Tragically the fight against the rapidly growing British Empire is as nothing against the internal squabbles that erupt between the United Irishmen and the Loyalists and Murphy reminds us that the enemies within are often the bitterest we will ever encounter.
Dufour, $22.95.