9780525538653-0525538658-My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son's Search For Home

My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son's Search For Home

ISBN-13: 9780525538653
ISBN-10: 0525538658
Author: Michael Brendan Dougherty
Publication date: 2019
Publisher: Sentinel
Format: Hardcover 240 pages
FREE US shipping

Book details

ISBN-13: 9780525538653
ISBN-10: 0525538658
Author: Michael Brendan Dougherty
Publication date: 2019
Publisher: Sentinel
Format: Hardcover 240 pages

Summary

My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son's Search For Home (ISBN-13: 9780525538653 and ISBN-10: 0525538658), written by authors Michael Brendan Dougherty, was published by Sentinel in 2019. With an overall rating of 4.2 stars, it's a notable title among other Cultural & Regional books. You can easily purchase or rent My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son's Search For Home (Hardcover) from BooksRun, along with many other new and used Cultural & Regional books and textbooks. And, if you're looking to sell your copy, our current buyback offer is $0.33.

Description

The perfect gift for parents this Father’s Day: a beautiful, gut-wrenching memoir of Irish identity, fatherhood, and what we owe to the past.

“A heartbreaking and redemptive book, written with courage and grace.”
–J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy

“…a lovely little book.”
–Ross Douthat, The New York Times


The child of an Irish man and an Irish-American woman who split up before he was born, Michael Brendan Dougherty grew up with an acute sense of absence. He was raised in New Jersey by his hard-working single mother, who gave him a passion for Ireland, the land of her roots and the home of Michael's father. She put him to bed using little phrases in the Irish language, sang traditional songs, and filled their home with a romantic vision of a homeland over the horizon.

Every few years, his father returned from Dublin for a visit, but those encounters were never long enough. Devastated by his father's departures, Michael eventually consoled himself by believing that fatherhood was best understood as a check in the mail. Wearied by the Irish kitsch of the 1990s, he began to reject his mother's Irish nationalism as a romantic myth.

Years later, when Michael found out that he would soon be a father himself, he could no longer afford to be jaded; he would need to tell his daughter who she is and where she comes from. He immediately re-immersed himself in the biographies of firebrands like Patrick Pearse and studied the Irish language. And he decided to reconnect with the man who had left him behind, and the nation just over the horizon. He began writing letters to his father about what he remembered, missed, and longed for. Those letters would become this book.

Along the way, Michael realized that his longings were shared by many Americans of every ethnicity and background. So many of us these days lack a clear sense of our cultural origins or even a vocabulary for expressing this lack--so we avoid talking about our roots altogether. As a result, the traditional sense of pride has started to feel foreign and dangerous; we've become great consumers of cultural kitsch, but useless conservators of our true history.

In these deeply felt and fascinating letters, Dougherty goes beyond his family's story to share a fascinating meditation on the meaning of identity in America.
Rate this book Rate this book

We would LOVE it if you could help us and other readers by reviewing the book