Book fest

Peter Quinn features all of these and more in his intelligent and readable thriller “Hour of the Cat,” which is set in New York and Berlin in 1938.
Quinn — whose other novel was the Civil War-set “Banished Children of Eve” — returns to hardcover fiction in what has been a very strong year for Irish-American authors.
Several of them have also delved into the worlds of the above-named professions.
In non-fiction, T.J. English is on familiar ground with “Paddy Whacked: the Untold Story of the Irish-American Gangster.” He made his name with “The Westies” — one of the most celebrated true-crime books of the 1990s – and followed up with “Born to Kill,” which was about Vietnamese youth gangs in New York’s Chinatown.
There are plenty of villains, and heroes too, in Thomas Kelly’s “Empire Rising,” the backdrop of which is the construction of New York’s most famous landmark 75 years ago.
However Kelly, whose novel has been included in New York Times Book Review’s 100 notable books of the year, is just 44. Arguably the most fascinating Irish-American themed work of 2005 is a memoir by Thomas Fleming, who was born before the Empire State Building displaced the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. “Mysteries of my Father” recounts growing up in Jersey City’s privileged political class in the 1930s and ’40s. The prolific Fleming, who has written more than 45 novels and history books, also penned “Washington’s Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge,” published in October. His next book, which has a Civil War theme, is due out in January.
Fleming isn’t the only Irish-American writer hitting his stride at a time when people in most other walks of life have retired. Last month, the paperback edition of Pete Hamill’s “Downtown” appeared in bookstores, as did a hardcover reissue of his 1973 novel “The Gift,” about a young navy recruit arriving home to Brooklyn in 1952.
And what about Andrew Greeley? He can write a book, it seems, in the time it takes others to play a round a golf. The Chicago sociologist and priest took time off from skewering George W. Bush, and the rest of his busy schedule, to tap out “The Bishop in the Old Neighborhood,” the latest in his Blackie Ryan mystery series. Greeley had two other books published in hardcover this year: “Irish Cream,” in his Nuala Anne McGrail series, and “The Making of the Pope: Inside the Vatican Conclave” an analysis of the elevation of Cardinal Ratzinger.
Dennis Smith is also a writer whose experience in other careers has informed his writing. In his latest, “San Francisco is Burning,” the city’s heroic firefighters are at the center of an account of the 1906 calamity. The book appeared in September just days after a catastrophe of a similar magnitude struck New Orleans.
There’s plenty more for those interested in memoir and biography. Skeptical critics who picked up Michael O’Brien’s 900-page “John F. Kennedy,” arguing that there were already enough books about America’s most famous family, were won over in the end. Not least of the author’s strengths, they said, is his judicious summary of existing literature and scholarship on all the key debates surrounding JFK.
Rocker Larry Kirwan’s memoir “Green Suede Shoes” (and the only one of the new books mentioned here not in hardcover) is rather shorter, though County Wexford also gets an honorable mention in its early pages. Meanwhile, the up and coming Frank McCourt has written a much talked-about memoir, “Teacher Man.”
Two rather less conventional books written in the first person are recommended: Thomas Lynch’s musings on his transatlantic comings and goings to West Clare, “Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans,” and Gwendolyn Bounds’s search for what’s important in life in her atmospheric “Little Chapel on the River.”
Forced to abandon her Ground Zero apartment, Wall Street Journal reporter Bounds recovered from the trauma of Sept. 11, 2001 in Garrison, N.Y., and eventually moved to live there. The book, however, is less about her and more about Co. Offaly immigrant Jim Guinan, who took over the local general store and bar in 1959.
There were two noteworthy books more directly about 9/11 itself: “102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, both of the New York Times, and Los Angeles Times journalist Terry McDermott’s “Perfect Soldiers – The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It.”
And let’s not forget Dwyer and Flynn’s colleague Maureen Dowd, who has attracted a lot more attention than is usual for a Times journalist-turned-author with her latest volume “Are Men Necessary?”
Three Irish-born, American-based writers brought out very different volumes of fiction in 2005. “Ireland” by former BBC commentator Frank Delaney is a sprawling historical epic that begins with a seanchai visiting a home on a wintry night in 1951. This is the first novel by the Tipperary-born Connecticut resident Delaney, whose previous books include a guide to “Ulysses.”
Tom Phelan, a Laois native who lives on Long Island, has won praise for his fourth novel, the World War I-set “The Canal Bridge.”
And while not every year sees the emergence of a major new Irish literary talent, such claims were made in 2005 about Patrick O’Keeffe, with the publication of “The Hill Road,” a collection of stories set in his native County Limerick. The 42-year-old University of Michigan lecturer was this month named to the shortlist of three for the $20,000 Story Prize to be announced in Manhattan on Jan. 25.
Two novels by Irish Americans are worth a mention. Mary Gordon’s “Pearl” begins with a New Yorker hearing that her daughter has chained herself to a flagpole outside the U.S. embassy in Dublin and has not eaten for six weeks.
And Cormac McCarthy, one of the most celebrated and admired of modern writers, has in “No Country for Old Men” produced his most accessible novel to date, according to some. The New York Times has reported, however, that “…if the postings on McCarthy-obsessed Web sites are any indication, not all his fans are happy with it.”
One wrote: ‘It’s obvious to me that McCarthy has an account at Blockbuster — he’s seen ‘Pulp Fiction,’ ‘One False Move,’ [and] ‘Natural Born Killers.’ ‘
But as many of the above-mentioned authors will tell you: crime does pay.