James Plunkett, author of Strumpet City, one of the best books on Dublin, was born on 21 May 1920 in the Hibernian metropolis. Strumpet City details the lives of common Dublin folk and their hero, James Larkin. The novel is an excellent fiction…
Larry Kirwan's Rockin the Bronx charts the last big wave of Irish emigration to America. Part of this migration fetched up in the Bronx's Bainbridge neighborhood in the early 80s. The denizens of Kirwan's novel are undocumented, undereducated, and u…
The histories of the less exalted in the right hands can make for fascinating reading. While much ink has been spilled writing of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Hitler, less is known about how those figures affected the lives of the many who followed o…