Product Description

Tom Hayden explores the psychic, emotional and political consequences of the erasure of a rebellious Irish heritage by generations seeking the respectability of American assimilation. This, he argues, has yielded to an Irish American literature of sentimentality typified by the work of Frank McCourt and to high rates of schizophrenia, depression, and alcoholism within the community. By re-inhabiting their history, today's Irish-Americans could recognize their links to others now experiencing the prejudice once directed at their forefathers and thereby offer an independent Irishness to global movements for peace and justice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1334906 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-25
• Released on: 2001-10-25
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.15" h x 5.70" w x 7.82" l, 1.01 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Hayden, a leading student activist in the 1960s and now a California state senator, writes about finding his Irish roots in a book that will have many Irish-Americans up in arms with its take-no-prisoners, leftist spin on Irish history. But he makes some very good cultural points. He speaks, for instance, of the "colonization of the mind" and how this affected the Irish under British rule and as immigrants in America, which largely started with the potato famine of the 1840s. Hayden's humor is mordant and dry as he takes on such "experts" on the Irish as former senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who thought the Irish lacked intellectual curiosity), and former governor Pete Wilson of California, who boasted of his Irishness while running anti-immigrant ads. He speaks of growing up in an Irish-Catholic family which could have come out of a Eugene O'Neill drama; his admiration for John and Robert Kennedy, particularly the thoughtful, saturnine Bobby who emerged after the death of JFK. Hayden then goes on to report on everything Irish in America, from the Molly Maguires and the "forgotten" San Patricios, to the politics of the wild Fenian revolutionary, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. He then gives his spin on the struggle in Northern Ireland and how it was sabotaged for years by such Irish-Catholic luminaries as Tip O'Neill, Ted Kennedy and former House Speaker Tom Foley. Some of his points will outrage the Irish establishment in this country, but Hayden makes a strong case for his leftist interpretation of Irish and Irish-America history..

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
During the 1960s, Hayden was in the forefront of social justice activism, but the conflict in his ancestral homeland was not part of his agenda. Hayden's family had long ago suppressed its Irish identity to merge into Anglo-American society. That changed in 1968 when civil rights marches in Northern Ireland awakened in the young radical an awareness of his ethnic identity, and later friendships with Northern Irish activists Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness revealed the connection of Old World struggles with those in the New. This work is both a memoir and an examination of Irish and Irish American history. Unfortunately, much of Hayden's analysis is overly simplistic, accepting as self-evident claims the text does not otherwise support. For example, several times he asserts without qualification that the Irish Famine was "the greatest upheaval of nineteenth century Europe" conveniently ignoring such disasters as the Napoleonic Wars or the Revolution of 1848. As a personal memoir, however, this is a revealing look at Hayden's youth and his journey of self-discovery. Recommended for larger public libraries. Christopher Brennan, SUNY at Brockport
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
A valuable contribution...a tale of one man's odyssey from being a head under the parapet, Irish descended political activist in California to being a fully paid-up member of that large and respectable class, the Irish American peaceniks.--Tim Pat Coogan