Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America » (Reprint)

In this stunning work chronicling the author's exploration of his own past--and the lives of many hundreds of thousands of nameless immigrants who struggled alongside his own ancestors--Peter Quinn paints a brilliant new portrait of the Irish-American men and women whose evolving culture and values continue to play such a central role in all of our identities as Americans. In Quinn's hands, the Irish sterotype of "Paddy" gives way to an image of "Jimmy"--an archetypal Irish-American (a composite of Jimmy Cagney and Jimmy Walker) who comes to life as a fast-talking, tough-yet-refined urban American redefining American politics, street culture, religion, and imagination. From their immigration into America to the politics of the modern day, Quinn's vibrant prose weaves together the story of a people that has made an immeasurable contribution to American history and culture.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

Like African Americans, Irish Americans have made contributions of incalculable dimensions to American society and culture. They changed and enriched the language, gave us our greatest playwright (Eugene O'Neill), some of our finest writers (Flannery O'Connor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice McDermott, William Kennedy) and our greatest movie director, John Ford, one of the "master interpreters of the [American] dream." Now they have given us, in this fine book, a way to help us understand them, and thus ourselves.

Foreword     11
Family and Memory
Looking For Jimmy     19
In Search of the Banished Children     43
The Skillins     57
The Perils of Pat     67
Stones of Memory     74
Politics and Place
Plunkitt of Tammany Hall     87
Local Politics, Irish-American Style     101
Life of the Party     112
Civil Service     122
The Bronx is Burning     127
Cast a Cold Eye: William Kennedy's Albany     138
Faith and Imagination
Confessions of a Bronx Irish-Catholic     155
Sic Transit     164
The Catholic Imagination     172
Holy Orders     188
City of God, City of Man     193
Silence and History
The Triumph of Bridget Such-a-One     211
An Interpretation of Silences     231
Closets Full of Bones     246
Lost and Found     257
A Famine Remembrance     267
Conclusion
Irish America at the Millennium: How the Irish Stayed Irish     273