Book Review
White Savage
William Johnson and the Invention of America Fintan O’Toole
 Fintan O’Toole,
Irish Times columnist and drama critic, has taken a break from the theater
to write an extraordinary new book about an important link between Ireland
and America. The book is entitled White Savage: William Johnson and the
Invention of America.
William Johnson was born into a Gaelic-speaking, Catholic family in Ireland
but later converted and became a Protestant, the only choice for a boy
with such great ambition.
Johnson would go on to serve the British Empire in North America in the
1730s.
In New York State he became a successful fur trader and landowner. But
he was perhaps best known because of his ability to forge cordial relations
with the Iroquois Confederacy.
In fact, after the French and Indian War broke out, Johnson led British,
colonial, and Iroquois forces which defeated the French in a key battle.
Johnson’s style of warfare was so successful that the American revolutionaries
would later adopt many of his tactics to defeat the British.
O’Toole argues that Johnson, because of his closeness with native
Americans, lived as a “white savage.” O’Toole shows
that North and native Americans were not always at each other’s
throats and were, in fact, often willing to work together. Johnson was
capable of bringing these parties together. He spoke Mohawk and had two
wives — one European, the other native American — and fathered
quite a few children. More broadly, Johnson comes across as a central
figure of the American Revolutionary period and also one of the
more important — and overlooked — Irish Americans in early
U.S. history. ($26 / 402 pages / FSG)
Booking Passage
We Irish and Americans Thomas Lynch
 Like Frank McCourt,
Thomas Lynch had a successful — and utterly unique — career
before he turned to book writing: He was an undertaker.
Lynch’s latest is Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans, a follow
up to his National Book Award finalist The Undertaking as well as
Bodies in Motion and at Rest. Lynch has also published three collections
of poetry.
Lynch first visited Ireland in 1970 to meet family in west Clare,
a land of “spinsters and farmers, local heroes, poets, clergy, and
corner boys,” according to Lynch.
The past, present and future collide in this book when one cousin dies,
and Lynch prods another to look into some modern conveniences such as
TV and running water. But Lynch (who lives in Milford, Michigan) also
learns a thing or two, mainly about his family’s traumatic past.
Lynch also offers up digressions on the Catholic Church, alcoholism, and
his own troubled personal life (one marriage ended but he tried another
one).
Booking Passage is an eye-opening look at the complicated relationship
between the Irish and Irish Americans, as well as a meditation on broader
themes such as ethnicity and humanity. ($24.95 / 296 pages / Norton)
San Francisco Is Burning
The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires Dennis Smith
 As profoundly disturbing
as the events in New Orleans during the late summer of 2005 were, this
was not the first time a major American city has had to rebuild
itself.
A new book by one of Irish America’s most interesting writers reminds
us of the devastation — and political fallout — of the horrific
San Francisco earthquake of 1906. San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold
Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires by Dennis Smith may sound awfully
familiar to people who watched the tragedy unfold in New Orleans.
Well over 500 blocks and 28,000 buildings were destroyed, and 200,000
people needed to find new homes.
Smith, whose mother was an Irish immigrant, is a former New York City
firefighter whose other books include Report from Engine Company
82 and the more recent Report from Ground Zero. In San Francisco Is Burning,
Smith painstakingly dissects the aftermath of the San Francisco conflagration.
One can’t help but think that another, similarly-informative expert
will be doing the same for New Orleans down the road. ($25.95 / 294 pages
/ Viking)
The Columbia Guide to Irish American History
Timothy J. Meagher
 For
an informative look at the high (and sometimes low) points of Irish American
history, well known scholar Timothy J. Meagher (an author of the indispensable
New York Irish) has written The Columbia Guide to Irish American History.
For those interested in getting a broad overview of Irish American history,
pop culture and sociology, it is an excellent read. ($45 / 398 pages /
Columbia University Press)
The Sea
John Banville
 It is about time that
Irish writer John Banville received some widespread acclaim. In October,
Banville won the prestigious and lucrative Man Booker Prize for his novel
The Sea, which was published earlier this year in the United Kingdom.
Now, it has been released in the U.S.
For years, Banville has been something of a “writer’s writer,”
a master prose stylist whose 14 novels are also deeply intellectual.
Now that Banville has won the Booker, hopefully more readers will see
that Banville’s sometimes demanding work is worth the effort.
Banville’s latest novel revolves around a widower named Max who
returns to a locale where he spent an eventful vacation decades earlier.
In many of Banville’s past works, he explores the question of identity
by presenting us a pair of doubles — in the case of The Sea, a mysterious
set of twins named Myles and Chloe. It is not long before Max is drawn
into a disturbing relationship with the duo, one which may help (or make
it impossible for him) to reconcile himself with the past.
The Sea is shorter than some of Banville’s past novels. All the
more reason for uncertain readers to pick up Banville and see what a genius
he really is. ($23 / 208 pages / Knopf)
Symptoms of Withdrawal
Christopher Kennedy Lawford
 It may, at times, seem
like the last thing the world needs is another Irish memoir or another
Kennedy book of any kind. Nevertheless, here is another one, entitled
Symptoms of Withdrawal by Christopher Kennedy Lawford, son of actor Peter
Lawford and JFK’s sister Patricia Kennedy.
It must be said, however, that Lawford provides an amazingly vivid glimpse
into a world of both Washington and Hollywood insiders.
Lawford grew up with the wealthy and powerful but could not avoid falling
into a dark hole of drug and alcohol addiction.
Now sober, Lawford — an actor and substance abuse activist —
can add author to his list of accomplishments. ($25.95 / 389 pages / Morrow)
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