A well-researched but rambling family account and guide.
A debut work combines an epic prose poem about the lives of the writer’s Irish immigrant ancestors with a manual on how to narrate a family history.
“When we tell our story, we also give voice to our family’s values,” writes Murphy in his introduction. This prose poem about the author’s great-grandfather Michael begins with the man’s parents, Patrick and Mary, immigrating to Boston from County Waterford, Ireland, in 1845. The first chapter, “An Cinneadh,” meaning “The Decision” in Irish Gaelic, is a “standalone and self-contained prose poem” that the author later incorporated into this book, reimagining their sea voyage to the New World. After settling in the outskirts of Boston, Patrick found work as a stonemason and the couple had seven children, one of whom was Michael. Although Murphy’s research stretches across generations of his family history, Michael’s story is central, detailing his 1864 enlistment in the Union Army to serve in the Civil War and his later ascension to the role of chief of police of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and also chief mills inspector for the city’s textile industry. The author also records how other family members went on to join the military, serving in World War I and Vietnam. The second part of the book acts as a brief guide on “how you can write your family story,” addressing issues such as “Why write about the past?”; approaches to research; and how to creatively fill in gaps in knowledge.
The intriguing story of the Murphy family’s carving out its place in the New World is one that many immigrants will find familiar. Michael’s tale reveals an impressive depth of research, drawing on family photographs and interviews and even delving into Lawrence Police notices to examine cases that he may have been involved in at the time. Unfortunately, a great deal of the account involves speculation. The author uses the words may have repeatedly and pads out the narrative by presenting anecdotes from the wider immigrant experience. This is forgivable on occasion, but the frequency of reference book–like passages depersonalizes an intentionally personal story: “Because it had low value as a commercial export food, the potato had long been considered food for Ireland’s poorest, leading to the nickname of ‘potato people’ for the struggling lower class.” This language betrays what is expected from a prose poem. Indeed, Murphy’s descriptive skills sometimes lack poetic creativity: “Mary was a strong woman”; “It was clear Patrick was a strong man.” The narrative is also jumbled and repetitive. The opening chapter chronicles Patrick and Mary’s sea voyage. The author then goes over the same ground by discussing the voyage again midway through the text. The “how to” part of the book is similarly digressive. Although it enthusiastically encourages others to explore their ancestral histories, the manual lingers on trivial subjects, such as the use of the Oxford comma and the importance of mentioning family pets. This work will prove a vital and highly informative document for the author’s family. Still, the volume may struggle to attract a wider audience.
A well-researched but rambling family account and guide.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-67-547856-9
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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