By Tom Deignan

Non Fiction

The Thomas Cahill “Hinges of History” juggernaut continues to roll on with his latest work Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe. Once again Cahill (whose past entries in the series include How the Irish Saved Civilization and the most recent Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea) offers an accessible overview “and revision” of a historical time period.

Cahill, in typically bold fashion, wants us to rethink what we believed we knew about the Middle Ages.

“Though often represented as a period of repression, heavy with superstition, the Middle Ages offered, at least in religious roles, more options than are now allowed,” he writes. The intense worship of the Virgin Mary, for example, elevated the status of women, according to Cahill. The debate over how communion bread was transformed into the body of Jesus spurred intense philosophical debates that eventually broke new intellectual ground. Along the way we take trips to Rome, Paris and Florence and get snapshots of figures such as Francis of Assisi, the artist Giotto, and the early Franciscans, who are dubbed “the world’s first hippies.”

It’s not necessary to agree with all that Cahill says to enjoy Mysteries of the Middle Ages.

($32.50 / 320 pages / Nan A. Talese)

As Ireland enters its own multicultural age, historians will surely begin showing greater curiosity about how previous ethnic minorities lived in Ireland. The most famous figure, of course, is Joyce’s Jewish character Leopold Bloom, the main protagonist in Ulysses. In his new book Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History, Cormac O’Grada explores the rise and fall of a vibrant Irish community. O’Grada, Professor of Economics at University College Dublin, focuses largely on Dublin’s Little Jerusalem, which drew notice in the 1870s when Lithuanian Jewish immigrants began settling there. The community thrived until around the 1940s. O’Grada, whose other books include Black’47 and Beyond, has identified what might seem to be an obscure topic and made it highly relevant for contemporary readers.

($35 / 320 pages / Princeton University Press)

Speaking of obscure, Kevin J. Rich (with the assistance of Marilyn Sieberman) has just completed Irish Immigrants of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank. This limited edition lists the actual banking data of mostly Irish immigrants whose account numbers were 2501 to 7500. This might seem dull but many of these entries reveal fascinating details about how and why the Irish came to New York, where they came from and where they settled.

($29.99 / 382 pages / Broadway-Manhattan)

The ties that bind father to daughter, nation to nation are on display in Vietnam: Our Father Daughter Journey by Ed and Zoeann Murphy. (Full disclosure: This columnist is proud to call the authors his cousins.) The book is a written as well as photographic journey through recent decades, covering the tumultuous events which led Murphy to Vietnam in the 1960s, protest back home in the 1970s, and then back to Vietnam as the past painfully began to recede.

Ed provides much of the historical context, discussing his Irish Catholic Democratic upbringing in almost rural Staten Island, his flirtation with a life inside the church, and then his trip to Vietnam, where he helped wage war before coming home and fighting to end the conflict.

Zoeann’s photos capture the beauty and vitality which drew both of them back to this divided nation decades after the war had ended. Along the way, both reflect on war and peace, family and art.

Fiction

Side Manhattan Irish gang, English (whose last book was a history of Irish-American crime) catches up with some of the main characters who made his book so memorable.

($14.95 / 400 pages / St. Martin’s Griffin)

Add Peter Behrens’ name to the list of writers (Kevin Baker, Joseph O’Connor) who have managed to tell sweeping stories with the horror of the Irish Famine as the backdrop. Behrens’ new novel The Law of Dreams is an ambitious look at one Famine immigrant’s trek across the United Kingdom, before finally making his way to Canada.

Behrens’ own ancestors fled the Famine. They landed at Grosse Isle in Canada, a quarantine site where a monument to those who did not survive the coffin ships stands today. The Law of Dreams is centered around a teenager named Fergus O”Brien, whose tenant farming family is jolted by the blight of 1847.

The O’Brien farm is burned down by their landlord, in one of this novel’s many heartbreaking scenes. Young Fergus eventually ends up in a workhouse, seeks revenge on his landlord, and makes his way to Liverpool where he becomes a street urchin/male prostitute. At times sprawling, even downright baggy, The Law of Dreams is nevertheless a highly impressive effort.

($24.95 / 408 pages / Steerforth)

Handy Andy: A Tale of Irish Life by Samuel Lover was first published in 1842, and a new edition is out to expose a new batch of readers to this look at 19th century Ireland. Handy Andy is more or less a collection of sketches revolving around Lover’s main character, who never seems able to make the right decision. More interesting than the adventurous (occasionally farfetched) plot, perhaps, is Lover’s vivid depiction of Irish life in the mid-1800s.

($9.95 / 540 pages / Trafalgar Square Publishing)

Biography

Patrick O’Keefe’s highly-acclaimed collection of novellas The Hill Road has just been released in paperback. Drawing on personal experience of living in Limerick (as one of 10 brothers and sisters), O’Keefe’s quiet tales of love and loss earned comparisons to William Trevor and John McGahern.

($14 / 236 pages / Penguin)

Two new books about Irish boxing giants have just been released. Tunney: Boxing’s Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey by Jack Cavanaugh outlines Gene Tunney’s two famous victories over fellow Irish pugilist Jack Dempsey in the 1920s. Tunney’s second victory was the famous “long count,” which some felt gave Tunney an unfair advantage, and even turned boxing fans against this brainy champ, who loved to quote Shakespeare.

Cavanaugh is excellent on the broader sports world of the 1920s, and is also strong on Tunney’s rough-and-tumble youth as the son of Irish immigrants living in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.

Tunney’s dad was a longshoreman from Mayo who grew up idolizing John L. Sullivan, the bare-knuckled and blustering heavyweight champion from Boston. It turns out Tunney’s dad hated violence, but he knew the value of being a good fighter. In a poor neighborhood populated primarily by Irish immigrants of limited means, such as the one in which the Tunney family lived, flexing one’s muscle was, if not a way out, then possibly a way up.

($27.95 / 471 pages / Random House)

Memoir

Meanwhile, Adam J. Pollack has just completed John L. Sullivan: The Career of the First Gloved Heavyweight Champion. It traces the transition, which Sullivan spearheaded, of boxing from smoky halls that showcased often illegal fights, to the center of the sports world by the early 20th century.

Irishmen like Sullivan, Dempsey and Tunney dominated the sport for decades. ($45 / 254 pages / McFarland)

Another Irish trailblazer was the seventh U.S. president, Andrew Jackson, the son of Scots-Irish immigrants. Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H.W. Brands is one of the first books to take a more sympathetic view of this president often dismissed as a crude Indian killer. Brands does not emphasize Jackson’s Irishness, but with another Jackson bio supposedly in the works by Princeton academic all-star Sean Wilentz, a reassessment of Jackson seems to be underway. Given the disdain with which the elites viewed Jackson, a strong argument is waiting to be made about Jackson as the first Irish immigrant president.

($16.95 / 656 pages / Anchor)

Actress Ellen Burstyn has just written a memoir that explores her Irish Catholic youth in the Detroit area, where she was born Edna Rae Gillooly.

In Lessons in Becoming Myself, she doesn’t exactly offer a sympathetic portrait. Her parents were abusive, and Burstyn ultimately argues that her traumatic youth pushed her to pursue her acting career.

Nevertheless, as one of the more brilliant actresses of the postwar American era (she won an Oscar for her tortured lead in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) Burstyn’s memoir makes for interesting reading. All in all, Burstyn was nominated six times for an Academy Award, and also won a Tony for her performance in Same Time, Next Year. She still serves as co-president of the Actors Studio in New York City.

($25.95 / 480 pages / Riverhead)

Hugo Hamilton has followed up his first memoir The Speckled People. In The Harbor Boys, Hamilton focuses on the 1960s, a time when the Troubles were beginning to grip all of Ireland. Hamilton’s mother was a German immigrant with a deep hatred for what the Nazis did to her home nation. Hamilton’s father was an Irish nationalist, so the past seemed almost oppressive to Hamilton. A waterfront job seems like an escape, but trouble with a Protestant at work brings fresh tension and echoes of a historical conflict into Hamilton’s life. Once again, Hamilton has written a lively, if at times somber, memoir.

($24.95 / 272 pages / HarperCollins)

Wake Forest University Press continues to admirably pursue its mission to publish compelling Irish poetry. Recently they’ve released a large volume of Thomas Kinsella’s Collected Poems, sure to broaden Kinsella’s reputation as a “city poet.”

($18.95 / 379 pages / Wake Forest University)

An elegant, slim volume by Vona Groarke entitled Juniper Street illustrates how living in the U.S. (the Irish-born Groarke has taught at Villanova and Wake Forest) has influenced the author’s poetry.

($11.95 / 57 pages / Wake Forest University)

Author Elvira Woodruff and illustrator Adam Rex have teamed up to create Small Beauties: The Journey of Darcy Heart O’Hara, set in 1840s Derry, as the Famine approaches and threatens to shatter the innocence of the title character. At times heartbreaking but also full of wonder, this book manages to introduce dark themes in an accessible way.

($15.95 / 32 pages / Knopf)

For somewhat older readers there is Water Street by Patricia Reilly Giff. Set in Brooklyn among Irish immigrants and their children, this book chronicles the trials and tribulations of young Bird Mallon and Thomas Neary, who learn some harsh lessons about life and love as the Brooklyn Bridge is constructed right outside their window.