The most recommended books on Irish Americans

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.

From a former speechwriter for New York governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo–and current historical detective novelist and essayist that I have long admired—this wise and witty memoir summons up a lost world: an Irish Catholic Bronx enclave of the 1950s and 1960s before economic and social change transformed the borough.

Quinn’s prose style is lively and gripping, as befits the primary drafter of then Gov. Mario Cuomo’s famous speech at the Democratic National Convention of 1984 assailing “Reaganomics.”

It was just so well written, with such great characters. I felt completely immersed in that world, and although I didn't like the world of the book, I very much enjoyed experiencing it.

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.”

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.

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.

I first encountered Noel Ignatiev’s ground-breaking and hugely influential book, How the Irish Became White, after I moved from Ireland to America to work at UConn.

I was electrified by its thesis and found it very helpful in thinking critically about Irish-American identity and history. After all, that had become my heritage too once I crossed the Atlantic.

Ignatiev opens by outlining how the Irish fled to America from a motherland under British occupation and a colonial caste system that dehumanized them.

He argues that in America the new immigrants embraced a hierarchy based on race, as a result of which the oppressed became the oppressors: for Ignatiev, the Irish assimilated by becoming more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists, gaining “whiteness” by refusing to make common cause with Black fellow workers.

How the Irish Became White challenges the dominant story of how the Irish succeeded… show more.

This book is about sixteen-year-old Katherine Mary O’Fallon, who early in the twentieth century, moves to Canada to recover from an extended illness. She falls in love with a six-foot-tall sergeant in the Canadian Mounted Police, Mike Flanigan—a man of courage, kindness, and humor. They marry, and overnight the couple travels for days by dog sled, as Mike is to become a combination of police, doctor, and mayor of a small community in the harsh, unforgiving Canadian Northern Territory.  

This story shows life in the untamed Northern Territory through the eyes of Kathy. Even though she is afraid and completely oblivious to the adventures before her, she faces her new life head-on. Through the kindness and calm positivity of her husband, Kathy heals from her illness, learns self-reliance, and finds an inner strength she didn’t know she possessed. The love story is sweet and the descriptions of life… 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.

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.