Lonely Planet Jaywalking with the Irish(Lonely Planet Travel Guide Series)
- Book Review,
by David Monagan
From Publishers Weekly
In 2000, American-born journalist Monagan and his wife packed up their Connecticut house and their three children and returned to their roots in Cork, Ireland. "Why not muster one great adventure before we were worn down with age or savaged by school tuition bills?" Monagan had long adored Ireland, having studied in Dublin and occasionally revisited. His passion remains at the surface of his memoir, yet the Ireland of the present often bears little resemblance to the one of his memory. Monagan recounts enrolling his children in school; watching his wife struggle to find work; trying to blend in at the local pub; and navigating Ireland's byzantine bureaucracy with a light touch. Monagan's story, though, grows dark as his family finds itself at the mercy of teenage hoodlums, and one son has difficulty adjusting to school. The story floats from incident to incident until midway through, when Monagan decides he wants to start a regional magazine. The various characters occasionally blur together, and Monagan skates through his final two years in Cork too quickly, insufficiently tying up loose ends. The writing, however, is frequently mellifluous, offering a glimpse into some of Eire's still-existent magic and delving into the slippery questions of identity that confront most travelers. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
(New York Daily News, January 2, 2005)
Were they heartless? Selfish? Brave? These are the questions that haunt (the Monagans) in this charming, poignant and humorous tale.
(New Zealand Herald, December 8, 2004)
It's often laugh out-loud funny. The strength of the book is that it represents the totality of Ireland.
(Belfast Telegraph,December 17, 2004)
The book never failed to entertain. A great read -- thoroughly recommended.
(Irish American News, February 1, 2005)
This is the ultimate travel-to-Ireland book.
(Daily Yomiuri - Japan, March 18, 2005)
Monagan, who obviously has more than a little of the fabled Irish gift for storytelling, alternately entertains, delights and saddens.
Book Description
David Monagan is a restless, middle-aged father of three who for years has dreamed of relocating from the USA to Ireland, the land of his forebears. In his elegantly written, often hilarious narrative, Monagan describes his family's evolving struggle to come to terms with life in a strange land. The result is an honest, heartfelt and penetrating portrait of a contemporary Ireland that is so often portrayed through the wistful lens of cliches that no longer apply. Jaywalking with the Irish is a tale of revelations - about donkey carts transformed into BMWs, about great blessings of warmth sometimes laced with begrudgery, about what happens to a family that ditches stability for the tricky task of fitting in abroad.
From the Inside Flap
"Jaywalking with the Irish is a hard, beautiful book about Ireland, written with love but facing head-on the darkness and ugliness that rode in on the back of the Celtic Tiger. There are begrudgers and menacing teenagers in this tale and you wonder why the Monagans of comfortable Connecticut stayed in Cork at all. Well, that's the story. That's the wonder. When the darkness is pushed aside you're in a bright landscape where people, if you'll forgive the platitude, believe life is for living. So do the delightful Monagans -- and that's why they found their niche in Cork. David Monagan captures the country and its landscape in detail and he does it with wit, charm, and compassion. You won't find a better or depiction of Ireland than this one." Frank McCourt, author Angela's Ashes "Jaywalking with the Irish is a great read and a celebration of Cork. It is also a better book than the immensely popular McCarthy's Bar -- at once more honest and human, while offering a deeper conversation with Ireland and yet managing to be funny in all the right places." Tom McCarthy, author Mr. Dineen's Careful Parade and executive of the Cork Europea Capital of Culture 2005 project
About the Author
Based in Cork with his wife and three children, the Connecticut-born author writes widely about his adopted country for publications like Forbes FYI, The Times (London), San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Vancouver Sun, Irish Times, Irish Independent, and The Dubliner. Credits too numerous to mention include The New York Times, Boston Globe, Discover, Reader's Digest and the form Omni magazine. Monagan is presently working on a book about the journey into the depths of the human heart as led by several of the twentieth century's most tragic and eccentric medical pioneers. The book is tentatively entitled "The Billion Dollar Balloon."
Excerpted from Jaywalking with the Irish by David Monagan. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1 For Ireland, the morning sky was a strange canvas of blue peace, the day before the most fateful September 11 in history, and the world felt at once fresh and familiar as I entered the Turkish barber on Cork's MacCurtain Street. A swarthy fellow with a long black ponytail and hefty gold neckchains motioned me into the chair. He tucked a bib under my chin and began clacking his scissors. "What's your name?" I asked companionably, looking out at the pedestrians ambling on the street named after a lord mayor who was shot dead by British irregulars eighty years earlier. "Ahmad, I am called. And you, you are not from here?" "No. The States." "America?" he asked, clipping and chopping with a vengeance. "Yes. And yourself?" "I am from Irag." Pause. Snip. His scissors suddenly flew into overdrive. "We are at war." Gulp. Being trapped in a foreign barber's chair before a hulking figure who deems you his blood enemy is not reassuring, especially when the man in charge has a variety of razors at his fingertips and is commencing blade work close to the jugular. Psychologists refer to the "Stockholm syndrome" when captives develop an inordinate desire to befriend those in control of their fate. I embraced it. "But we are not at war. It is our governments that are butting heads, and the Iraqi people don't exactly love Saddam Huseein either, do they?" I tried, scarcely imagining what engines of destruction were wheeling forward at that moment. "Saddam a great man," Ahmad insisted, curling a length of string into a curious noose-like configuration. I considered bolting out the door then and there with the bib hanging pathetically from my neck. But then, any rash movement could prove terminal. So I instead meekly asked, "Have you been here long?" "Two years," he said, his fingers ominously tightening the looped string. I nodded, having just commenced a second one in the Irish bedevilment boot camp myself. Were't we merely fellow sojourners in the end? "Is your family still in Iraq?" "Yes, my father a pilot," Ahmad fairly spat as he leaned over my straightjacketed self. Without warning, he cinched his miniature noose around a straay facial hair and yanked the ends with all his considerable might, sending the errant follicle flying in the general direction of Baghdad. It hurt. "Oh, he flies an airliner?" I struggled for composure. Whoosh went another hair. "No, a fighter jet. He is captain in Iraqi air force." This was getting bad. Friends of my deceased fighter-pilot brother had probably lined Ahmad's dad up in their sights more than once. Dim recollections of UN sanctions and jump-jet-enforced no-fly zones burst into my head. Better not mention the brother, I decided, as the Barber of Baghdad dipped a Q-tip into a jar of oil. This he set on fire. "Do you like Ireland?" I tried, then watched openmouthed as he drove the tiny torch into my ears, ostensibly to burn off more errant hair there, or maybe just to keep me in line for an official Baath Party stiletto knife tucked in his apron. Ahmad, eyes going adamantine, had the look of a man gleefully at one with his work. "It is far better than America." At that point, I shut up. Happy to get out unmaimed, I in fact tipped Ahmad generously and limped off, nursing a head full of questions. Outside, the incongrous contrasts of Irish life lay rampant -- purveyors of tin whistles, curry and "free poppadum," New Age potions, Baptist bible services, adult entertainment, country house heirlooms, and black stout stood side by side, while a pig farmer I'd once met began his day's lurch toward a dark den favored by local musicians and poets. Here lay the curious sweep of the Republic's second-largest city or, more accurately, the biggest village in Ireland... At that naive moment, all I knew was that the simple act of getting a haircut had grown at once sinister and comic. Ahmad had seemed a pro. Knowing Cork as I do now, I'd consider betting a tenner he was simply winding me up. But the story must begin at the start, with a fascination with Ireland that reached back through decades... "I'm not going!" our six year-old son, Owen, shouted when, eighteen months earlier, we had announced our plans to drop everything and move to Ireland. Then he crawled under a coffee-table, squeezed sheets of newspaper into balls, and furiously flung them out in all directions. His parents, the people he trusted more than all others, were destroying everything he treasured, so he now barricaded his small fortress with cushions from the couch. Why a comfortable family should suddenly pack off across the seas to a rain-lashed chimera in the Atlantic is a question that confounds us still, as does the very essence of this brooding island that inspires, baffles, and wounds with equal sport... "You're moving where?" asked out mothers, their faces drooping in dismay. They knew something about Ireland. Its quicksilver was in their genes, its hot and cold running emotions and doomed aspirations and pirouettes of talk and dream were handed down in buckets by their forebears and passed around in endless measure by their husbands now dead. Ireland to them had another simpler identity -- it was the starting point for a flight to a better life elsewhere. Inexplicably, their offspring were turning straight back into the vortex, heading the wrond way down history's highway...
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