Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans
Books / Hardcover
Books › Biography & Autobiography › General
ISBN: 0393042065 / Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, June 2005
Traces the author's numerous visits to the Irish community where his grandfather lived one hundred years before, describing his relationships with local residents and how the town and its people reflect the larger outside world.
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"So, Tom that went and Tom that would come back!" is how Nora Lynch greeted the young American Thomas Lynch in 1970, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the cottage that his great-grandfather - another Thomas Lynch - had left nearly a century before on a one-way ticket to America.In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Ireland, Lynch has found a template for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish. The neighbors and characters he found there - spinsters and farmers, local heroes, poets, clergy, and corner boys - taught him to look, as Montaigne said we ought, for "the whole of Man's estate" in every man.Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a guidebook for those whom Lynch calls "fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims" making their way through their own and the larger histories.
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