Irish America
Irish America
Will Real John Banville Please Stand Up! Wexford native and Booker-prize-winner John Banville has spent his celebrated literary career exploring the slippery nature of identity and reality. Characters in Banville’s dazzling, challenging novels, such as The Untouchable or Athena, slip in and out of personas, and conceal so many secrets from friends and family (not to mention … [Read more...] about Crime Pays for John Banville
By Megan Smolenyak
As the rest of the world commemorates what would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday, I celebrate my 60th. More or less confined at home. Not the circumstances I would have chosen, but just about all of us are apt to have pandemic-impaired birthdays, so no complaints. Still, a milestone like this makes one reflect, and the lack of distraction makes it … [Read more...] about John Lennon and Me
(20 years behind)
By Irish America staff A trio of New York journalists Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and Jim Dwyer, profoundly changed the way newspaper columns are written. Where once columns were either think pieces or puffery of the rich and powerful, Breslin, Hamill and Dwyer pioneered a “man on the street on the side of the little guy” style that transformed modern journalism. To New … [Read more...] about Jim Dwyer Storyteller
By Niall O'Dowd
It was fitting that in his last column for The New York Times on May 26th, Jim Dwyer wrote about the quiet heroism of his great grandmother in saving her family during the 1918 flu pandemic.
She was known as Nan the Point from a remote area near Killorglin in Co Kerry. Her daughter Mary, her son in law Paddy, and seven children had all contracted … [Read more...] about Farewell to a LegendJim Dwyer, a beloved figure and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter,
columnist, and author, passed away at the age of 63 on October 8, 2020
He deserves a better judgment As Bobby Kennedy lay dying on a hotel kitchen floor, we’re told his last words were of concern for those around him who had also been shot. “Is everybody okay?” Kennedy asked. These noble, altruistic last conscious thoughts chime with how many people see him – a champion of the poor, “a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, … [Read more...] about Bobby Kennedy Has Been Turned into an Impossibly Perfect Hero
