Confessions of a Shanty Irishman (Audible Audio Edition) Michael Corrigan Marlin May Writer Books
Download As PDF : Confessions of a Shanty Irishman (Audible Audio Edition) Michael Corrigan Marlin May Writer Books
This audiobook concerns growing up in San Francisco's Mission District in an Irish American immigrant family that loves the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party, language, and Jameson's whiskey. The protagonist, Corrigan, comes of age during a time of great cultural changes in the U.S. His grandfather and father appreciate Bing Crosby but are not ready for Elvis. Corrigan's life is reflected through factual and fictional events, from early childhood in a rich Irish culture to the student riots at San Francisco State during the Vietnam War era. He continues a search for identity through drink, romantic love, theatre, and the written word. Many phases of development are examined, from Catholic education in the 50s to the icons that changed music and film Presley, Dean, and Brando. The audiobook ends with its beginning, an examination of those forgotten Irish immigrants of another time.
Confessions of a Shanty Irishman (Audible Audio Edition) Michael Corrigan Marlin May Writer Books
Michael Corrigan's newly published Kindle books are 2011 editions of his "minor cult classic" (as I seem to recall someone writing) of a fictionalized memoir Confessions of a Shanty Irishman, and his more recent and wholly un-fictional memoir A Year and a Day: Journal of Grief, inspired (if that is the word) by the sudden death of the love of his life Karen, his wife of too few years.Confessions of a Shanty Irishman begins with a charming portrait of the grandparents who helped his dad to raise him and of his growing disenchantment, after their death, with both his now-and-again present mother and the rigors and hypocrisies of a Jesuit schooling; and later of his intellectual and sexual adventures through the `60s, as well as his drinking troubles and passing activism during the California campus troubles of that revolutionary era. It ends appropriately enough with his settling down and marrying his beloved Karen, which marked an end to the years of dissipation and malaise.
A Year and a Day is an invaluable record of loss that might be read profitably by anyone facing such a crisis. It begins with this very appropriate epigraph, from Samuel Beckett: "I can't go on, I'll go on"; the book's great strength is that, rather than press any one-size-fits-all self-help solution to grief, it simply shows - with brutal and cleansing honesty - the slow progress, over the Irish people's traditional year and a day of mourning, of a particular man and a particular grief.
Here is an excerpt from Confessions of a Shanty Irishman: "On the way home, Grandfather described the three breeds of Irishmen: Lace Curtain for the well off, Shanty Irish for the working class, and the extremely rich Micks called Two Toilet Irish.
"`We won't ever have two toilets in our house,' he said, `unless you make a killing in vaudeville. We're shanty Irish. The neighbor woman used to look down on me when I came home covered with tar, but whose door was she knockin' on when her lawyer husband needed a blood transfusion? Mine! Never gave blood in me life, but I did. I guess I wasn't so Shanty then.'"
I should also mention Michael's collection of stories, These Precious Hours, which is presently being serialized at The Scream Online . I have fond memories of editing three or four of these fabulous pieces for publication at New Works Review. Mark them in your agenda book as essential reads! (The book is also available in a 2010 Kindle edition and in a new audio version.)
Brett Alan Sanders, Aug. 14, 2012
(reprinted from blog at [...])
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Confessions of a Shanty Irishman (Audible Audio Edition) Michael Corrigan Marlin May Writer Books Reviews
The English and the Irish have a love hate relationship. The Irish hate the English while the English love the Irish. It is fitting, therefore, that an Englishman should review the Memoirs of a Shanty Irishman by Michael Corrigan.
My knowledge of the Irish and Ireland was largely formed in London pubs where my best drinking pals were Irish, but naturally...Thus was developed my stereotyping composed of the following characteristics of the Irish man-child
1. They talk well.
2. They listen badly
3. They love horses.
4. In dealing with the opposite sex, they confuse the Madonna with the whore and the whore with the Madonna.
5. They drink alcohol in great quantities.
6. They are polite and insolent simultaneously, which is a really neat trick.
7. They are gentle and kind but only when sober.
The Shanty Irishman under review, in this nicely embellished memoir, demonstrates all of the above except one. I leave it to the reader to discover which it is.
This readable piece rattles along as we get to know the son of a San Franciscan postman who grew up in the fifties in the bosom of an immigrant Irish family and who has fought since to be an "American" while insisting on an Irish identity. Michael is a Mick and Corrigan is a peg to hang his life's hat on. Here with all its personal contradictions is the story of the second generation immigrant that wants something more than simply being part of the American Dream; here is the man born in the land of the free who yearns for his real roots.
Buy this book. Read it. Enjoy. Despite its embellishments, it is real, and it is written from the heart. And we know the author has real Irish blood nourished by potatoes (or Murphys as I was led to call them). He now lives in Idaho.
Michael Corrigan has a gift to share. From the erin green covers to the morsels of his memories within them, the author serves himself up to the reader like a meat and potatoes stew. Alternately dark with pathos, then light with sudden bursts of humor, this story lives. The author's way with words is purely Irish, through and through.
His San Francisco home is shared by an old country grandfather who worked hard and proud to make America his home; a calm and sensible grandmother who unfailingly nurtures all three men she loves; and a handsome father who works and pays the bills despite his losing battle with the demon drink. Moving in and out of the Michael's life are kinfolk who are all apples off the same Irish tree, each with their own personality and contribution to the author's childhood memories. A mother who abandoned her Irish Catholic husband and infant in search of fun is an occasional visitor, a mystery throughout the author's life.
Mr. Corrigan cooks up a fine, rich broth with his memories. I was intrigued by his family, his lifelong friends, the nuns who taught him as a child, and the priests who took him from innocent altar boy to a manhood full of doubt about his faith. A genetic love of drink plagues him from early on. His struggle with the Irish Catholic faith is honestly relayed through thoughts or spoken words. And his appreciation of the fair sex is sometimes humorous or sad. But it was the author's relationship with his father that, for me at least, put the shine on this novel. His father dies young, a dissipated remnant of the once darkly handsome charismatic man who raised his son without a mother. The author's memory of that day haunts me
"The old days of Irish wakes with ice lifted off the corpse for drinks had passed. Now it was only a rosary, and relatives listened to the priest reciting before the open coffin. I wondered if the Vikings weren't right to put the body on a ship and riddle the vessel with fire arrows, rather than lay the body out for morbid viewing. I couldn't accept that plastic-looking empty husk as my father. Thomas. It was too much of a contradiction, a furious denial of what he had been in life. Where was the person who took the wheel of his brother's boat and waved at the home movie lens? When would we hear that warm baritone again with its Bing Crosby resonance?"
Confessions of a Shanty Irishman is selling well and finding an audience. Deservedly so. Michael Corrigan's voice is strong, resonant. I like to think he inherited that resonant voice from his father, and that somewhere in the afterlife, Thomas Corrigan is proud.
Highly recommended.
Michael Corrigan's newly published books are 2011 editions of his "minor cult classic" (as I seem to recall someone writing) of a fictionalized memoir Confessions of a Shanty Irishman, and his more recent and wholly un-fictional memoir A Year and a Day Journal of Grief, inspired (if that is the word) by the sudden death of the love of his life Karen, his wife of too few years.
Confessions of a Shanty Irishman begins with a charming portrait of the grandparents who helped his dad to raise him and of his growing disenchantment, after their death, with both his now-and-again present mother and the rigors and hypocrisies of a Jesuit schooling; and later of his intellectual and sexual adventures through the `60s, as well as his drinking troubles and passing activism during the California campus troubles of that revolutionary era. It ends appropriately enough with his settling down and marrying his beloved Karen, which marked an end to the years of dissipation and malaise.
A Year and a Day is an invaluable record of loss that might be read profitably by anyone facing such a crisis. It begins with this very appropriate epigraph, from Samuel Beckett "I can't go on, I'll go on"; the book's great strength is that, rather than press any one-size-fits-all self-help solution to grief, it simply shows - with brutal and cleansing honesty - the slow progress, over the Irish people's traditional year and a day of mourning, of a particular man and a particular grief.
Here is an excerpt from Confessions of a Shanty Irishman "On the way home, Grandfather described the three breeds of Irishmen Lace Curtain for the well off, Shanty Irish for the working class, and the extremely rich Micks called Two Toilet Irish.
"`We won't ever have two toilets in our house,' he said, `unless you make a killing in vaudeville. We're shanty Irish. The neighbor woman used to look down on me when I came home covered with tar, but whose door was she knockin' on when her lawyer husband needed a blood transfusion? Mine! Never gave blood in me life, but I did. I guess I wasn't so Shanty then.'"
I should also mention Michael's collection of stories, These Precious Hours, which is presently being serialized at The Scream Online . I have fond memories of editing three or four of these fabulous pieces for publication at New Works Review. Mark them in your agenda book as essential reads! (The book is also available in a 2010 edition and in a new audio version.)
Brett Alan Sanders, Aug. 14, 2012
(reprinted from blog at [...])
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