While health practitioners now praise the protein and amino acids provided by salmon, it has long had its place in Irish history simply because it is such good eating. Every year more than 180,000 people visit Ireland expressly to engage in an activity that has been one of the island’s top drawing cards since the first intrepid hunter-gatherers arrived over 7,000 years ago: … [Read more...] about Sláinte: The Mighty Salmon
2014
Poem: “Soda Bread”
She said she’d lost the knack—not the recipe, which had never been written down— but the knack of mixing the dough just so, not too much, not too little, so that the moist, buttery loaves rose into their perfectly rounded shapes, the cross impressed in the top revealing itself as the crust hardened, sure as the Annunciation. It was because my father had … [Read more...] about Poem: “Soda Bread”
Review of Books
Fiction Someone By Alice McDermott Someone captures the universal experience of life’s joys and tragedies in the story of Marie Commeford, a most unremarkable woman. The novel begins in Depression-era Brooklyn as Marie, a myopic 7-year-old sitting on the stoop waiting for her father, chats with a teenage neighbor, Pegeen. Despite Marie’s bottle-bottom glasses, she still … [Read more...] about Review of Books
Those We Lost
Jim Brosnan 1929 – 2014 Famed Irish-American baseball player and author Jim Brosnan passed away June 28 in Park Ridge, Illinois over complications from an infection. He was 84. Born in Cincinnati on Black Thursday, October 29, 1929, the day the market crashed, Jim was raised by an Irish father and German mother. He was an accomplished reader and musician in his youth and … [Read more...] about Those We Lost
Photo Album:
Granny Mac’s Centenary
My grandmother Nora MacNamara (née Hickey) turned 100 on June 15, 2014. From her retirement home on the Dingle peninsula, County Kerry – snuggled in the foothills of the Slieve Mish mountains and overlooking the clear blue Atlantic ocean – family and friends gathered to celebrate the centenary of a woman known to her grandchildren as simply ‘Granny Mac.’
What was the secret to … [Read more...] about Photo Album:
Granny Mac’s Centenary