Word: irishness
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Growing up in Appalachia in the 1950s, Brent Kennedy always believed that he was of English and Scotch-Irish descent, just like everyone he knew in his hometown of Wise, Va. But when he saw the film Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, he noticed that his family looked more like the Arabs in the movie than the British. Kennedy had inherited his father's light blue eyes, but he had his mother's black hair and in the summer would get a deep tan. He had heard a story about his great-grandfather being barred from voting in the early...
...Scottish manse, is not as easy to control, but he is a significantly better quote. With little prompting, he tells stories about growing up near the Yorkshire Dales ("We used to pee at the junction of the Ribble and Aire rivers to see whose would go to the Irish Sea and whose would go to the North Sea!"), ignoring the advice of theater directors ("barnstorm führers, the lot") and mocking "gibberish spouting" method actors. "When you're playing Hamlet, and you and Horatio are up on the battlements, Horatio says, 'But, look, the morn in russet mantle clad/ Walks...
...midst of Congress's struggle to pare the federal budget and close the gaping deficit, the House agreed by voice vote to send $250 million over the next five years to Northern Ireland. The money will go into an international economic-support fund established under an Anglo-Irish agreement signed last year by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Irish counterpart Garret Fitz-Gerald to give Catholics more of a voice in the affairs of Northern Ireland. The aid proposal allied two politicians who share Irish ancestry but rarely see eye to eye: Ronald Reagan and House Speaker...
Booze is the thematic undercurrent of Jimmy Breslin's fifth novel, a brutal slab of working-class life set among the Irish in the New York City borough of Queens. This is where Breslin learned his own trade as a newspaperman, reporting on the ways and means of the Archie Bunker set. His headlong bowling-ball prose can currently be found in the New York Daily News, where he is a Pulitzer-prizewinning columnist. There, as here, Breslin's lack of subtlety is his greatest strength. His characters are undereducated, abusive and conflicted by feelings of pride and shame. Table...
...discovers that he is restricted to the construction camp because the nearby Hudson River town of Beacon, N.Y., does not want muddy foreigners on its streets. Later Morrisons dig water tunnels in the Bronx. Owney's granduncle Jack stays above ground to work as a messenger for an influential Irish lawyer. One of Jack's jobs is to deliver expense money to William Butler Yeats, then staying at the attorney's (would you believe?) 30-room Manhattan apartment. Jack has sticky fingers; he usually lightens the cash envelope, and when his boss dies, Morrison and his sister-in-law steal...