Irish America

Praise

"With a fabulous blend of eloquence and anecdote, insight and compassion, candor and wit, Maureen Dezell has brilliantly captured the Irish experience in America. This is truly a wonderful book."
–Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and No Ordinary Time

"With this sparkling and shrewd portrait of a culture in transition, Maureen Dezell joins the ranks of the Irish American woman journalists who are as smart as they are charming."
–Nuala O’Faolain, author of Are You Somebody?

"At last a book that dispels so much of the myth, the fairy tale, the rose-tinted, shamrock-gilded blarney that has come to represent the way Irish-American culture is often seen. Maureen Dezell gives us a vibrant, cogent social history of the Irish in this country, rooting out the cliches and stereotyping that have come to define a people. For that alone, I feel indebted to this marvelous book."
–Dennis Lehane, bestselling author of A Drink Before the War and Prayers for Rain

"Maureen Dezell is an unrepentant truth teller. With wit, insight and unsparing intelligence she succeeds in demolishing the convenient time-worn stereotypes – comforting as well as insulting – that surround Irish America. In their place, she gives us a portrait of a people as they really are, with all their strengths, and contradictions, and enduring sense of self. Irish America: Coming Into Clover is a wonderful achievement."
–Peter Quinn, author of Banished Children of Eve

"With ‘Irish America: Coming Into Clover,’ Maureen Dezell has done tremendous identity-affirming service for all Irish Americans who have ever been confronted by the all too familiar assault, ‘just who do you think you are?’ Dezell’s brilliant exploration illuminates for all, the Irish American character, in its multi-layered, diverse, and sometimes paradoxical glory. And she does so in prose that mirrors that same character. This is not a traditional text, for it is written by an Irish American, herself as witty, hilarious, literary, and gifted at storytelling, as the very best of the Irish artists and social analysts she writes about.
The artistic, social, and psychological history in these pages also reveals many paths that may traverse beyond the limits of shame, stereotype, and self defeat, into an American landscape, already lush with Irish contributions in art, altruism, diversity, and a sense of community."
–Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

“[A] long-awaited corrective to the steady supply of clich?s and misunderstanding about the Irish in American culture.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

“A fascinating book that debunks myths and skewers stereotypes.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A very good, sometimes witty, sometimes sad book about Irish Americans, who they are and how they came to be.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer