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Midlife Irish: Discovering My Family and Myself
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Midlife Irish: Discovering My Family and Myself
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by Frank Gannon
Sales Rank : 1192205
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Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Warner Books February 2003
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0446526789
ISBN-13: 978-0446526784
Product Dimensions:
9.5 x 6 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 15 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Comic essayist Gannon, a first-generation American, serves up a tangy, tasty Irish stew that mixes memories with mythology and facts with fables. Examining Ireland from an American perspective, Gannon begins with a study of stereotypes ("In the winter, it's still green. Everyone in Ireland is continually looking for some excuse to drink. Even though everyone in Ireland can dance, they cannot dance and move their upper body at the same time"). Admitting "the real Ireland, I couldn't tell you," Gannon reflects on Irish aspects of his childhood and his father's New Jersey bar, Gannon's Irish American Refreshment Parlor. Those remembrances, an Irish history lesson and speculations on his parents' past serve as a warmup to an engaging travelogue of the trip to Ireland Gannon made with his wife, who told him, "Years and years of New Jersey have built up around you, like rust. Now it has to be scraped away." There's a lighthearted lilt as he compares places and people to American life and has amusing close encounters with the locals (one tells him, "we can take anything, put a fooking shamrock on it, and you'll buy it"). Intertwining personal observations, insights, free associations, cinematic references and humor, Gannon takes readers on a captivating cultural journey of the identity crisis less traveled. Going from routes to roots, the inventive humorist has written a charming memoir certain to entertain both Irish-American readers and an even wider audience. Map, illus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Description
For Frank Gannon, being Irish-American has nothing to do with Lucky Charms, Irish Spring, leprechauns, and "the wretched thing that has been made of St. Patrick's Day." It means returning to the land where his deceased parents were born in search of his own Irish identity. Soon, he will discover much about his mother and father, and even more about himself. MIDLIFE IRISH draws on the universal themes of love, loss, and laughter that have kept the Irish both miserable and happy-often at the same time -throughout the years.
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