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.

Irish playwright Jimmy Kerr's House Strictly Private was a standout of the recent First Irish Theatre Festival

Irish playwright Jimmy Kerr

Two Irish playwrights emerged from the recent 1st Irish Theatre Festival in New York, and it's time to mark their achievements. Playwright Jimmy Kerr is already well known to the Irish community here for his successful run of Ardnaglass on the Air, a knockabout rural comedy which played at the Manhattan Theatre Source in 2010, directed by actress Geraldine Hughes.

But House Strictly Private, a pitch-black comic drama, is an unexpected follow up to Kerr's rollicking festival debut. Tackling the subject of an Irish wake, the play at first unfolds with deceptive simplicity. Kerr introduces us to the McCracken family, who have gathered on the death of their uncle, whose early passing has not been anticipated. Coming together for the first time in years, they must confront the past and what it has made of them.

Kerr is a northern playwright and so he has an engaged sense of just how thorny and intractable the past can be, and how hard it can be to create a shared future when confronted with truths that can seem insurmountable. He certainly doesn't make it easy on his characters, whose lives and choices are revealed in panels that add dimension and layer to this uniquely thoughtful drama.

How am I going to live now? That's the question that hunts each of the blasted survivors of the destructive hurricane that was their uncle's life.

It's a hard question for a play that includes genuinely comic moments, and yet Kerr manages to wield the material with real skill. In particular he's good at offsetting your expectations with revelations that take you in directions you never anticipated.

Betrayal and how to contend with it is at the heart of House Strictly Private. Whether it's betrayal in love, or the way parents can betray their offspring, or the way society can betray its most vulnerable to the wrath of the strong, what engages the playwright is how long injustice can leave a legacy before the courage or the resolve is found to start again.

Although abuse is the theme that ties the generations together here, stepping out from its shadow is the unexpected option that makes this play both timely and indisputably Irish. Even the most broken family can cobble together a future from the glass shards of the past.

Kerr's characters are remarkable in their desire to live and their desire to heal. He also reminds us that nothing is funnier than suffering, and that if you can stand it -- and you should try to stand it -- a day will come when you may think so yourself.

The savagery that is unleashed on his characters when they're least equipped to withstand it finds its match in their determination to move beyond it. I have rarely seen the North's determination to contend with its past and find its future so memorably and movingly portrayed on a stage.

For Love, by debut playwright Laoisa Sexton, is the most impressive first play I have seen in two decades. Featuring a flawless cast that included the writer herself, the play took us on a whirlwind tour of contemporary Dublin seen from a young woman's perspective in a way that was so authentic and casually funny that it disarmed you from the first scene.

Sexton writes with humor and real passion about the actual lives of young women, crafting dispatches from the trenches that tell it like it happens, and you realize as you’re watching it just how unusual that is in the all-too male dominated craft of Irish playwriting.

Sexton's writing is highly crafted, smart but straight from life and it frees her actors up to give arrestingly rich performances, which they do. Jo Kinsella, Georgina McKevitt, John Duddy and the playwright herself are pitch perfect from start to finish, owning the language like they own the play.

McKevitt is particularly funny in her underplayed and subtle characterization of a bored housewife redeemed by shopping. Kinsella is a revelation as a good time girl who suspects the good times are coming to an end, and she finds both the scalding ironies and the unforgettable gags lurking in each scene so expertly that she had the audience applauding her mid speech. Both these actresses bring lived experience to the stage and enrich the show with them.

Sexton conveys a nervy defensiveness and vulnerability on stage that makes her impossible to look away from. Playing a character who has had her heart broken so completely that she holds everyone and everything at a remove, Sexton's female characters are the most interesting and most recognizably Irish I have seen on an Irish stage in years.

The 1st Irish Theatre Festival deserves accolades for bringing these talents to an American stage, and Irish drama has been enriched by their appearance.

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.

Origin Theatre to wow at 1st Irish festival for the fifth time in New York

Jo Kinsella in 'For Love'

It's time to give Origin Theatre its due, because its fifth annual New York festival dedicated to Irish playwrights (the only one in the world, as it happens) is running from September 3 to October 1 in New York.

For Origin it’s been a catalogue of successes because the company is celebrating its 10th anniversary season, and this year the month-long festival features Irish plays and musicals from 11 contemporary Irish playwrights (plus Eugene O’Neill) in productions from Belfast, Dublin, Boston and New York. 

Each of the main stage shows of the 1st Irish, as the festival is called, will be presented at well known venues in the city like the Irish Rep, 59E59, the Irish Arts Center, the Cell and the Drilling Company. 

“Five years and we’ve featured 72 Irish playwrights to date. It’s amazing isn’t it,” Origin’s artistic director George Heslin tells the Irish Voice.

“It’s year five so now we’re getting a huge amount of applications for the festival from Irish companies, so this year we have a broader scope. It’s not just theater -- it’s musicals and other aspects of theater. This year we’ll stage panel discussions and related events too.”

Right on cue to offer his services and his star power is Origin’s newest honorary patron, the Irish and British actor Brendan Coyle (Downton Abbey). Coyle joined the company in May and will appear during the festival to announce an upcoming 1st Irish project in New York.

The Cell on West 23rd Street will be the venue that hosts the premiere of Hard Times, a new musical written by Black 47 front man Larry Kirwan that juxtaposes Irish and African-American folk traditions. Hard Times will run from September 12 to 29.

Other highlights include For Love by the gifted writer, director and performer Laoisa Sexton. It’s a play about three women navigating the choppy waters of Dublin nightlife. The play will have its world premiere at the Drilling Co. and run from September 25 to 30.

New York’s Double Decker Productions will present New York-based playwright Jimmy Kerr’s House Strictly Private, a dark comedy by this searingly funny writer set in rural Northern Ireland, at the Drilling Co. from September 26 to 30.

The Irish Arts Center will present the U.S. premiere of writer and performer (and Irish national treasure) Pat Kinevane’s Silent, one of the most talked-about shows in recent years. Produced by Ireland’s preeminent contemporary playwright theater company Fishamble, the Edinburgh Fringe winner arrives direct from its sold-out run at the Abbey and will play from September 6 to 23.

In another headline show, the critically acclaimed production of Marie Jones’ hilarious comedy Fly Me to the Moon will have its U.S. premiere at 59E59, and run from September 5 to 30. 

Alongside the plays there will be panel events that will include a night called Damn Yeats, We’ll Write Our Own Plays, which will be a guided conversation featuring 1st Irish artists about the unique perspectives, traditions and characters of Northern Ireland’s theatre scene dating back to the early 20th century. 

The talk will be hosted by NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House, which is located at 1 Washington Mews off lower Fifth Avenue, on Thursday September 6 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Another new aspect of the growing festival is an event titled 1st Irish on Film, from Stage to Screen, a new series that explores the challenges of adapting plays to film. 

Hosted by the New York Irish Center in association with the Irish Rep, the special event features the Irish Rep’s award-wining Ciaran O’Reilly, who will perform solo excerpts from Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa before introducing a screening of the 1998 film version starring Meryl Streep and Michael Gambon. The performance and screening will happen on September 7 and 21, both at 7:30 p.m.

There will also be a reading by author Tony Macaulay from his best-selling memoir Paperboy about growing up in West Belfast in the 1970s, hosted by the W.B. Yeats Society at the National Arts Club on September 17 at 6 p.m.

And for one night only there will be a special performance of celebrated Irish actor Garrett Keogh’s play Setanta Murphy, a drama that addresses themes of life and death, which will be presented by American Irish Historical Society in association with Origin Theatre Company on Tuesday September 11 at 7 p.m.

Visit www.1stIrish.org.

A look at books - Irish gems of short stories, novels and history

The Colours of Man
By Micheal O’Conghaile


Michael O’Conghaile is already a famous short story writer in the Irish language, but this new collection of his most celebrated works translated into English will introduce him to a larger (and I am certain appreciative) new audience.

A typical offering in this brilliantly funny collection of short stories is Death at a Funeral, where O’Conghaile illustrates just why he’s widely revered as an Irish language author. O’Conghaile’s works illustrate what the poet W.B. Yeats called the Irish preference for a swift current in both language and human interaction.

Just look at these opening lines and marvel at their economy and wit: “It would have been ridiculous for Eamon Bartley to stay ensconced in his coffin any longer. He couldn’t anyway. He was far too good to have died.”

O’Conghaile can keep this kind of thing up without ever faltering, and that hilarious streak of black absurdity runs through his best works, disarming you with its sheer good humor and smarts. But for all their surface dazzle, these are deceptively subtle works with quietly subversive intentions.

Possessing an insider’s knowledge of the rhythms of Irish rural life as he simultaneously satirizes them with an outsiders remove, O’Conghaile is one of the most interesting and prodigiously gifted Irish writers I have read in years.

Clo Iar-Chonnacht, $19.

The Absolutist
By John Boyne

Irish novelist John Boyne is already an Irish publishing phenomenon.  Best known for the hauntingly sad New York Times bestselling novel (and then film) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, his new offering The Absolutist is his most satisfying and affecting novel to date.

Set in September 1919, Boyne introduces us to shell shocked 21-year-old Tristan Sadler, who has just taken a train from London to Norwich to deliver a package of letters to the sister of Will Bancroft, the young man who was his friend (and whom he fought alongside) during the Great War.

But Tristan has secrets, and it turns out the letters are not the real reason for his visit. Breaking down, he tells Will’s sister the true story of his friendship with her brother -- from their first meeting on the army training grounds at Aldershot to the wrenching finale in the trenches of northern France.

Boyne’s control of his material is masterful as he leads us into the smoking no-man’s-land of his hero’s scorched heart and soul.

Betrayal, jealously, pride and the stubborn refusal to embrace what you know will save you are all on display in this tragic and powerfully affecting new Irish novel.

Other Press, $16.95

Where Were You: Dublin Youth Culture & Street Style 1950-2000
By Garry O’Neill

Ravers, emos, goths, rockers, punks, new romantics, mods, skinheads, teddy boys -- depending what decade, Dublin knew them all.

Non-conformity has always had its own dress code, and now at last it has its own judicious chronicler in author Garry O’Neill (who for the record was once a member of one the most exalted underground youth groups of the last century – he was a teenage fan of The Smiths at their peak).

Beginning in 1950, O’Neill has carefully plundered the photo collections of hundreds of Dublin’s former scenesters to create this mammoth, funny and often moving tribute to the twin passions of pop music and street style.

Where Were You doesn’t intend to wallow in nostalgia, although it certainly invokes street styles and attitudes that are long gone. Instead it’s a vivid document of the hopes and aspirations of five generations of Dublin street culture.

Teddy boys are photographed in the grim Dublin landscape of the fifties. The loose-limbed swingers and hippies of the sixties stand in sharp and challenging contrast to the homespun city they parade through.

The seventies are commonly thought of as a lost decade for fashion, but the arresting diversity of style on the streets in those years shines through clearly in O’Neill’s fascinating book. The seventies scene begins with hippie relics and their voluminous flares, but it ends up with skinheads and punks and rockers revitalizing Dublin club land and music.

The eighties, one of the darkest economic decades in recent Irish history, still somehow manages to offer the widest range of alternative scenes in the last five decades, and O’Neill’s book captures the new romantics, the gender benders, the goths, the rockabillys and the newly emerging club kids who would lead the street style into the final decade of the 20th century.

O’Neill’s book is more than simply a record of the styles of each era. He has captured the hopes and dreams of 50 years of Irish teenage life. This book is a must have for anyone who grew up in Ireland between 1950 and 2000.

Hi Tone Books, $40.

Mary Deady’s American songbook at the West Bank Cafe

Mary Deady

Some singers are so good you can literally hear how much a song means to them as they perform it. It doesn’t happen very often, but it did last week at the West Bank Cafe on 42nd Street as Irish singer Mary Deady unveiled her latest musical journey at the Broadway hotspot.

A familiar face on the Irish scene in the city, it felt as though we were being collectively re-introduced to her since she is perhaps best known for singing Irish music. For many, including myself, this was our first introduction to her as a singer of the American songbook.

Aided by the utterly flawless musicianship of pianist and musical director Jeff Cubeta, Deady’s show From Ireland to America: A Musical Journey In Song was a marvel from the opening number.

It was Deady’s good fortune to be born in Co. Kerry, holy ground for generations of world-class singers and musicians. There she learned to play the harp, and later she left for Dublin for classically trained singing lessons that would eventually take her far from home on the musical journey that was her own life.

Deady chose songs that conveyed the immigrant love (and sometimes secret pining for) the homeland, and this she did as well as I have ever had the good fortune to hear. But the show has wider ambitions than merely relying on all too easy sentiment. Deady has a compelling tale to tell, and that is part of what takes this performance to the next level.

What I did not anticipate was being so moved by the deep connections between her life and the music that she took ownership of, each time from the first note.

Deady also sang songs in praise of the fairly demonic energy of New York City itself, and her version of the 1930 Cole Porter classic I Happen to Like New York seemed to conjure the whole damn city in a tribute that delighted the hard bitten New Yorkers in her audience. Believe me, that takes some skill.

“Last Sunday afternoon I took a trip to Hackensack,” she sang. “But after I gave Hackensack the once over, I took the next train back. I happen to like New York. I happen to love this burg.”

You know you’re deeply connecting when your audience is applauding you wildly before you’ve even reached the final chorus. That happened many times during Deady’s performance, and it’s a tribute to her skill as a singer that she could switch between the conflicting demands of the American songbook with its changes of mood and melody so nimbly.

You can’t sing a Stephen Sondheim song until you lived it first, and you can’t match his phrasing until you know exactly what he means. When you do, though, you can nail an audience to the wall with sincerity, experience, yearning and smarts that are his hallmark, and Deady did this so effortlessly that I found myself hoping selfishly she will consider offering an exclusively Sondheim evening in the near future.

In particular Deady’s rendition of “No One Is Alone,” culled from Sondheim’s masterful musical Into the Woods, found its emotional mark, conveying both rueful experience and the wisdom that it brings in the same note.

“Anyone Can Whistle” did likewise, but her version of “Not While I’m Around” from Sweeney Todd, which on the night she dedicated to her daughter, was so heartfelt and so carefully conveyed that it became one of the high water marks of the night.

There was fun to be had too. “Look to the Rainbow,” an irresistible number from the equally irresistible musical Finian’s Rainbow, lent some golden age of Broadway lyricism to the proceedings. In life as in song you won’t go too far wrong by following the fellow who follows a dream, and Deady made time for this reflection in her well-chosen set list.

I would have liked to have heard even more detail about her life and her relationship to the songs she sang on the night, but that was because Deady’s a natural storyteller, gifted with identifying the lessons of her own experience (and knowing how to have a laugh about them in the process). Hopefully that will be a feature of future productions.

Deady has travelled the world as the lead singer with the National Folk Theater of Ireland, but luckily for us she has found a home in New York City, where she has sung at signature venues throughout the city.
Knowing her audience on the night, Deady led a spirited encore of “Molly Malone,” and sent everyone home singing. What could be more Irish, or more delightful, than that?

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.

A look at books - Irish cooking, history and fiction

Irish Traditional Cooking
By Darina Allen

Can you call yourself Irish if you don’t own at least two Irish cookery books by Darina Allen? Simply put no one else has ever assembled the classic Irish dishes with the range and scope and appreciation for Irish tradition that she has.

In Irish Traditional Cooking Allen has assembled over 300 recipes that are as wholesome and unpretentious and the books title. Allen is a seasonal cook, which means she lists dishes that are in tune with the produce on offer year round, which makes this book an especially worthwhile purchase for discerning cooks.

This is magical food, prepared and presented in simple step-by-step measures that won’t intimidate. It’s made simple because Allen’s knowledge is authoritative, and she knows Irish cuisine inside out.

What’s especially fascinating is her knowledge not just of the recipes but also of the Irish cooking and baking traditions that produced them and her passion to preserve them is infectious.

Food can be a powerful gateway into the past and Allen knows this, and her chapter on making Barm Brack will probably take you back to your own childhood days in Ireland if you were lucky enough to experience it. If you weren’t this book is as close as you are ever likely to come. It can not be recommended highly enough.

Kyle Books, $35.00

Pure Cork
By Michael Lenihane

The garb changes from generation to generation, but the faces in the photographs in Michael Lenihane’s new book clearly belong to our tribe. From its origins as a medieval walled town to its status now as one of the top ten cities on the Lonely Planet’s Guide, Lenihane’s book Pure Cork traces the illustrious history of this mold-breaking city and the vivid people who make their homes there.

In a way never seen before Lenihane’s new book visually captures the city’s rapid evolution through a series of judiciously chosen photographs, post cards, maps, sketches and drawings, bringing to life the sights and sounds of the of the rebel city in the process.

Two hundred years of Irish history is contained within its pages and it’ll be a gift best appreciated by those who know what it means to be pure Cork, boy!

Dufour, $39.95.

Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails
Edited by Phillip O’Ceallaigh

The Irish are the world’s acknowledged masters of the short story form. In this punchy new collection from the innovative Irish publishing group The Stinging Fly Press we’re introduced to a new generation of Irish writers, this time edited by the award winning short story writer Phillip O’Ceallaigh.

This is a discerning new collection of emerging and established Irish voices that at times achieves startling originality and surprise with tales that involve murder, mayhem, love, confrontation and even sedate pastimes like taking Italian lessons taking unexpected turns.

The Irish short story form (and its writers) are looking further than the four green fields to Europe and in acknowledgement the editor has for the first time included European writers in the mix, adding an extra dimension to the already rich layers of metaphor and cultural exchange that already underscore the Irish experience.

Dufour, $21.95.

Citizen Dwyer
By Sean McCarthy

Authors often have to issue a caveat when it come to writing about Irish history, as if to explain the at times blatantly contradictory attitudes of the people themselves. This is as it should be. Everything is always being contested in Ireland; from the name of a child to the boundary of a property, you can be certain that someone somewhere is going to take a different view, and most likely at the worst possible moment.

Meet Wicklow Chieftain Michael Dwyer, the hero of McCarthy’s novel. Composed of delightfully contrasting characteristics, he’s a revolutionary idealist, and inspirational guerilla leader and a violent alcoholic. Hey, you have to take the bad with the good, after all.

In McCarthy’s sprawling new tale we follow McCarthy and his family as they are deported to a penal colony in Australia. In case you’re wondering it’s a fictional tale based on real characters, and it tells a sobering tale about the ravages of an uncontrollable addiction. Booze can make a meal of even the most accomplished men and so it proves in McCarthy’s moral fable.

Dufour, $27.95

Phillip Glass opera Satyagraha is extraordinary

On Saturday I enjoyed one of the highlights of my opera going life at the flawless production of the Phillip Glass opera Satyagraha, directed by Phelim McDermott.

Based on the life of Ghandi, with illuminating reference to the lifelong struggle of fellow titan Martin Luther King, the performance achieved moments of extraordinary beauty.

This being a Phillip Glass work it was also ponderous, aching, celebratory, stirring and at times - yes - seriously dull.

Glass reminds you what is unique about the opera's capacity to transport, because it's at once sublime and physical, heard and seen, and no other medium marries the elusive magic of music to the spectacles of the physical world with the same capacity for rapture.

Which is just a highfalutin way of saying I loved it.

Meanwhile we're at an unusual moment in the history of this nation, where the gulf between - to borrow a little opera parlance - standing room and orchestra prime have become dangerously pronounced.

After last night's performance of Satyagraha Phillip Glass himself came out to address the Occupy Wall Street protestors who had arrived at Lincoln Center to highlight what they called the 'certain disparity between its lofty moral message and the machinery of corporate arts funding.'

Lincoln Center was recently remodeled after a $100M gift from oil baron and Tea Party funder David Koch. But it's doubtful he ever envisaged it beging the scene of an impassioned discussion between audience members and protestors, as they debated issues of exploitation and civil rights (which, marvellously, are also the subject of Satyagraha itself) on the opera house steps.

If you can get tickets to see Satyagraha I can assure you you'll be glad you did.

Irish Writers Take Manhattan

The Stinging Fly is the name of the premiere Dublin literary magazine founded in 1997 to create a forum for emerging Irish writers. Now the magazine and its increasingly famous writers are coming to New York for the first ever Stinging Fly reading and interview series and the plan is to make as big a splash as possible (a series of lively discussions, reading and talkbacks will be held on October 25 through 27 at various locations throughout the city).

'The writers we’re bringing over are Irish writers we’ve been associated with for a few years,' says Stinging Fly editor Declan Meade. 'It’s work that we want to showcase. And we’ve also asked Irish writers who live here in New York to contribute to the event as well. So the works will be from the perspective of people who live here and from the people we’re bringing over from Ireland.'

Not only a magazine, but now also a publishing press, in recent years The Stinging Fly has become the recognized launch pad for a new generation of Irish talent. Created as the Celtic Tiger economy was taking flight, since that time it has helped launch the careers of writers like Emma Donoghue, Eamon Grennan, Kerry Hardie, Michael Harding, Claire Keegan and James Kelman.

'At the time we set it up back in the late 1990’s I had just come to Dublin and I was meeting young writers and the common complaint was there was nowhere to publish their work,' says Meade.  'I decided to set up the magazine with my friend Aoife Kavanagh. Neither of us knew anything about what we were doing, we really just wanted to see if the work was out there. Well it turns out it was out there and so we began to publish it. We started up very small and it’s built up over time.”

Early on they found themselves facing the dilemma of what to do when a short story writer deserved to have an entire collection published? The response was to set up their own publishing press. 'Everything we’ve done has grown organically from the question what is missing for new Irish writers? Our main focus has always been new writers coming up and the new writing that’s out there.'

Early in its operation the magazine also started interviewing more established writers on their way to international fame like Colum McCann and Emma Donoghue and giving them a forum too. For the first time The Stinging Fly was creating a real community of new Irish writers, albeit with a particular interest in promoting the short story form.

Writers need readers of course; it’s what publishing is all about. The Stinging Fly has succeeded in Ireland because it has successfully developed an audience and now they feel it’s time for it to grow, by introducing a new American dimension.

'It’s a great opportunity for our writers and hopefully it’ll be a great opportunity for the magazine in terms of new readers as well,' says Meade with characteristic understatement (the fact is that the Stinging Fly reading series has been slated as one of the top cultural events of the autumn so expect standing room only crowds).
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Irish writers slated to attend include Aifric Mac Aodha, Emer Martin, Sean O’Reilly and Keith Ridgway. All the events are free and everyone is welcome to attend. 'We believe that there is a need for a magazine that, first and foremost, gives new and emerging writers an opportunity to get their work out into the world,' says Meade.

In the spirit of openness and inclusivity Meade and the Stinging Fly organizers (which include Imagine Ireland) have also opened a space on their website for debut writers to write up their New York stories and experiences.

'Even if you have never been there yourself, chances are you know someone who has ended up calling New York their home,' says Meade. 'So you’re welcome to share your story there - or to just read other peoples.'

On Tuesday, October 25 at 7:00 PM at the Center For Fiction at 17 East 47 Street Nick Laird, Emer Martin, Sean O’Reilly and Keith Ridgway discuss the literary and cultural connections between Dublin and New York, and share their experiences of writing at home and away.

On Wednesday October 26 at 8:00 PM Aifric Mac Aodha, Sean O’Reilly and Keith Ridgway and Max McGuinness will read at Colombia University at 116 Street and Broadway. And finally on October 27 at 7:00PM Ciaran Berry, Tim Dwyer, Martin Espada, Emer Martin, David McLoghlin, Idra Novey, Jana Prikryl, Mark SaFranko and others will read at the Swift Hibernian Lounge at 34 East 4 Street. For further information and tickets visit www. http://www.stingingfly.org

‘A Tribute to Harrigan & Hart’ at Symphony Space in NYC

Next Thursday, October 13 at Symphony Space on 95 Street on the Upper West Side, The Irish Arts Center will present an absolutely unmissable tribute to the original kings of Broadway Harrigan and Hart.

An all-star concert, the once in a decade night will remind us that before there was George M. Cohan the songs of his hero Edward 'Ned' Harrigan, the Irish American songwriter and playwright, were the toast of Broadway.

The concert takes place on the hundred year anniversary of Harriagn's passing and through story, song and dance you'll see the artists of the calibre of Athena Tergis and Susan McKeown take to the stage to recreate numbers that will live in your memory.

For tickets CLICK HERE
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Tip Sheet recommends: Bogboy at The Irish Arts Center

In Bogboy, playing tonight and throughout the weekend at The Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, Irish actress Sorcha Fox plays Brigit the drug addicted young Dublin woman hanging to the edge of her own life by her fingernails.

Charismatic, focused, instinctive and pitch perfect, Fox’s performance is the key to the success of Deirdre Kinahan’s tender and accomplished new play.

Book your tickets HERE

Noctu Irish Dance at The Irish Repertory Theatre: Kill for a ticket

With his new show Noctu, Irish dance director and choreographer Breandan de Galli has created arguably the most challenging Irish dance work ever seen on a New York stage.

Noctu, which means stripped or laid bare in Irish, sweeps away everything before it in a work that breaks all the rules.

In tomorrow's Irish Voice Cahir O'Doherty talks to the show’s choreographer and has one piece of advice for you: kill for a ticket.

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney to read at 92nd Street Y

In a very special evening to open the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center’s 2011-2012 season, Ireland’s Nobel Laureate (and arguably the world's finest living poet) Seamus Heaney will read from his poetry. 

It's Heaney's only public engagement in New York this year and is certain to be a sell out. 

Tickets to this event will be available for purchase through 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center’s website click here for details.

Recommended: Cary Fukunaga's "Jane Eyre" - VIDEO

Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska in 'Jane Eyre'

Let's face it, remakes of Jane Eyre are have been a cottage industry for decades. But the new one directed by Cary Fukunaga is hugely worth your time this week because his visual flair is remarkable, as is his insistence that the tale be told at all times through the vulnerable but courageous spirit of the title character herself.

Fukunaga's film succeeds because he insists on the primacy of human interaction and he is never seduced by the period or the admittedly ravishing costumes and settings.

It's a quiet and immensely thoughtful film that works its magic on you discreetly, until you realize somewhere near the end its had a cumulative and revelatory power that sends you reeling into the street.


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