The most recommended books on Irish Americans

Pete Hamill is one of my father’s favorite writers. Both share a love of history and, especially, the history of New York, which is the backdrop of this book and the history of my family.

Hamill paints such a rich world that it’s easy to fall into it and long to stay. 

Many of my family called New York home, most via Ellis Island. Reading this story, which takes New York back to its beginnings, made me feel closer to my ancestors. I’ve walked those streets with my father and been in those neighborhoods, listening to his tales of his childhood and wondering what it all looked, smelled, and sounded like in the past.

I fell in love with this series and its intrepid heroine Molly Murphy on page one. A young, penniless woman who has to rely on her own wits to make her way to America at the end of the 19th century, and a sea voyage that ends well enough until she becomes a murder suspect as soon as she arrives in Ellis Island - this impeccably researched historical mystery has all the ingredients I could want. It’s a satisfying mystery and a scathing social commentary, the tone of voice is clever and funny, and I didn’t just want to follow Molly on every step of her journey, I wanted to be her. 

If, like me, you want to read an account of Irish America that is incisive but that also makes you laugh out loud, then I can highly recommend Irish America: Coming into Clover.

Written by former Boston Globe staff writer Maureen Dezell, this sharp portrait of contemporary Catholic Irish America from an insider to the culture explodes every cliché. Irish America: Coming into Clover is accessible history at its best, but it doesn’t just examine the past.

Dezell also considers the status of post-1845 famine Irishness in contemporary America, which she sees as being in deep contrast (both socially and racially) to its former status: in the nineteenth century, the Irish were only conditionally “white” and were initially subject to hostility from American nativists.

Dezell stresses that today, by contrast, the Irish are among the most educated and affluent Americans. This polish is on display in Dezell’s own creative language:… show more.

In this deft work of nonfiction, Duffy tells the life and times of William Bailey, a rough-hewn, big-hearted longshoreman turned Communist activist, and how on one summer day in 1935 he and several compatriots came to stage a remarkable protest by hauling down a swastika flag from the SS Bremen, the flagship of Hitler’s commercial fleet. Events unfold as the deluxe passenger liner, which was heartily patronized by many Americans and Europeans, hosted a glitzy party while docked in Manhattan harbor. It was years before the outbreak of World War II, but Hitler already had commenced his anti-Semitic and other repressive initiatives. The trial and acquittal of Bailey et al., and the diplomatic fallout, was what Duffy describes as “the first blow landed against the Third Reich by foreign adversaries, delivered without guns or bombs.”

Hemingway once said that a writer should “convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself.” As a reader, I don’t always need to feel like the story has happened to me, but when a book is written in first-person narrative, I do enjoy feeling like it really happened to the narrator. I love it when the main character sounds authentic and the author fades to the background, making it seem like a memoir. Such a book is Faith, by Jennifer Haigh. Although Faith isn’t categorized as crime-fiction, it involves an Irish Catholic family in Boston in 2002 during the height of the church’s pedophile scandals. As the narrator navigates her family dynamics after her half-brother is accused of sexual assault, she becomes a woman caught between faith and doubt, and she explores this limbo… show more.

Orangutan is a working-class opus. Broderick excels in his display of the grind and how some men can weather and accept, as the Boss sings, dying little by little, piece by piece, and how others need more help to make it through the day. The most compelling part of Broderick's writing is the way he is able to delineate between the haves and have-nots. And, no, I don't mean money. Some men can drink a six-pack on the weekend, even do some blow. They'll be fine. Others? Like Colin? A shot is too much of an allure. Not just to get drunk, wasted, blotto. It goes way deeper. It's a form of wakeful suicide. You get through the day. You get your paycheck. You survive. But the price is not living.

Road to Perdition takes place during the Great Depression. Like my book, it concerns a man who betrays his Chicago Irish-American mob boss and is forced to flee for his life (accompanied by his young son in this case), pursued by a relentless killer sent by his former boss. Superficially, what appealed to me was the Depression-era atmosphere that the author of Road to Perdition created. On a deeper level, it appealed to me as a story of a man in a battle for the soul of his son. The man, an enforcer for his gangland boss, considers his own soul to be irredeemably lost because of the crimes he has committed, not only survive but to thrive.

As a child and youth, O’Dwyer witnessed the depredations committed during the Irish War of Independence by British troops and their much-feared and resisted recruits, the Black and Tans. In this extensively researched biography, journalist-historian Coogan traces how the former accountant Michael Collins, as director of intelligence for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), astonished British governments used to crushing prior Irish rebellions.

After signing a controversial treaty creating the Irish Free State (with concessions opposed by the O’Dwyer family), Collins fell victim to an assassin’s bullet. I finished this biography filled with questions about Collins’ death and what might have happened to the formally partitioned nation had he survived.

Thomas’s 2015 novel revolves around Eileen Leary, a tough Irish American nurse yearning to break the middle-class mold in which her life is set when her husband, Ed, a neuroscientist, develops early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Thomas describes his slow deterioration and the ravages inflicted on Eileen and their son, Connell, in drawn-out moments and exquisite detail. In an especially harrowing scene, Eileen stays up all night watching her once brilliant husband struggle with the simple task of tabulating the final grades in his community college class.

Though the narrative sometimes gets bogged down in minutiae, it is as unsparing an account of Alzheimer’s as I have ever read.

I read this book while working on an alternate reality graphic novel for Marvel Comics, X Men Noir, in which we had the Empire State Building as an active docking spot for airships (as intended).

Turns out the actual Great Depression-era construction of the ESB was even more harrowing and fascinating than in our book, as Kelly makes clear here.