Word: macken
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cromwell failed, says Author Macken, because of "little men" like Dominick MacMahon, who proved that the human back is stronger than the oppressor's whip. Surviving the siege of Drogheda-during which his wife is murdered and one child struck dumb-stubborn Dominick dodges his way through sacked and smoking Ireland accompanied by a saintly priest, helped by Irish guerrillas and making the customary hairbreadth escapes from gun and gallows. Author Macken brings such sweeping lyricism to this flight as to make it seem that plucky Dominick is battling his way the length of Siberia instead of the mere...
...GREEN HILLS AND OTHER STORIES (205 pp.)-Walter Macken-Mocm...
...most skilled practitioners in the ambiguous craft of whittling the Irish character into attractive shape is Walter Macken, and his product is as exportable as the golden Irish whisky that sells for a duty-free $1.50 a fifth at Shannon Airport. Macken's wild geese fly west, sometimes to nest in their natural habitat in the U.S. book club (his novel, Rain on the Wind, was a Literary Guild selection). He specializes in the most Irish part of Ireland, i.e., Galway in the west, least touched by the modern (or non-Irish) world...
...Macken has told 21 stories, mostly in a brogue as thick as barley soup. A typical one is "The Currach Race"-a currach being the paper-thin, skin and withy rowboat in which Galway fishermen put out into the Atlantic. Colm wants to marry Sorcha, a fisherman's daughter. But the fishermen despise Colm because he is a farmer. Their taunts goad him into taking an oar in a currach race on St. Patrick's Day. He nearly kills himself, but in the end, bless him, they agree he's a great man, and there...
...Macken's stories are charming, but the charm, like the defense mechanism of the inkfish, is calculated to conceal the soft, sentimental underbelly from its natural enemies-in this case, people who don't like being codded...