Posts by Michael Quinlin

Hidetaka Hirota The hordes of Irish immigrants who came to North America in the 19th century were more often paupers, traumatized by famine, disease, war and social injustice. Their transatlantic migration to eastern seaboard cities like Montreal, Boston, New York and Philadelphia is well documented. Less understood is how rampant anti-Irish nativism toward these immigrants…

Michael Coffey Author Michael Coffey has published a new book called Samuel Beckett is Closed. Written according to a sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes to the unpublished manuscript, “Long Observations of the Ray,” Coffey’s book is a mediation that shifts through numerous themes that range from a NY Mets Baseball game in…

Foreword: Caroline Kennedy Think of this exquisite coffee-table book literally as a family album, with photos, snippets from letters, humorous asides and personal reflections. But it’s a family album that chronicles one of America’s most famous families. The 300 plus photographs, overwhelmingly black & white, were lovingly saved and preserved by Rose, who in many…

Peter Behrens Canadian author Peter Behrens has written an epic tale of a sprawling Irish family in 20th century America that starts in Quebec and ends in California.  Along the way family ambition, betrayal, madness and violence are all examined by beautiful prose and great insight.  Publishers Weekly called The O’Briens a work of ‘rough…

Patrick L. Kennedy and Lawrence W. Kennedy Foreword by Bill Rogers. The Boston Marathon is filled with iconic characters like John J. McDermott, who won the first contest in 1897, and Johnny Kelley, who finished the race 58 times. Equally notable is “Bricklayer Bill” Kennedy, a working class Irish-American who was part of the amateur…

Cóilín Parsons Literature and history are inextricably linked in Ireland. Wandering bards and minstrels, then novelists, essayists and poets, measured every inch of the Irish experience on this tiny island. Cóilín Parsons, English professor at Georgetown, examines ways in which Irish writers viewed the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, a massive 22 year public works project…

Garrison Nelson John McCormack worked his way from South Boston’s housing projects to a leading figure in the U.S. Congress, winning 22 consecutive elections from 1928 to 1971. In 1962 he was elected the first Catholic Speaker of the House, serving nine consecutive years, a record later broken by his protégé Tip O’Neill.Written by Garrison…

Cynthia Levinson and Sanford Levinson Written for children and young adults, Fault Lines in the Constitution is a wonderful introduction to one of the world’s enduring documents. The husband-wife team features Professor Sanford Levinson, a Harvard Law constitutional scholar and his wife Cynthia, a well-known writer of children’s literature. Together they trace the origins of…

Christine Breen Christine Breen has written a beautifully-rendered first novel that takes readers on an odyssey from Dublin and County Clare to Boston and New York and back. In 1990, an American girl studying in Dublin gets pregnant and gives up her baby Rose for adoption to an Irish couple who raise the child with…