Vantage Points: Prose Parables of the Republic

Shaun O\u27Connell brings his usual insights to his book review essay. Our novelists, he concludes, have served us better than our politicians in classifying our condition — an accomplishment that is somewhat less grand than it seems when we remember that the recent competition came from George Bush\u27s Read my lips and A thousand points of light and Michael Dukakis\u27s Good jobs at good wages and I\u27m on your side. Among the works discussed in this essay: Firebird, by James Carroll; Where I\u27m Calling From: New and Selected Stories, by Raymond Carver; Paris Trout, by Pete Dexter; Selected Stories, by Andre Dubus; Jack Gance, by Ward Just; A Writer\u27s America: Landscape in Literature, by Alfred Kazin; Spence + Lila, by Bobbie Ann Mason; A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan; and Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler

Home and Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America

From the Editor\u27s Note by Padraig O\u27Malley: Shaun O’Connell has lost none of his touch. In “Home and Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America,” O’Connell juxtaposes two novels: Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy (1998) and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) and reveals the parallels and contrasts that enrich the discussion of Irish and Irish American identities. Toibin, an Irish writer, would have us see an America, land of the free, as an open, inviting place but exacting in redeeming promises made; McDermott, an American writer, portrays an Ireland that is magical, a little bit of heaven, but finally a closed and bitter place. Each author reveals how an imaginary landscape across the sea affects the sense of place, how “away” redefines “home.

Climate. A Period of Consequence: Environmental Literature of 2006

The author talks about the consequences of not respecting the climate and understanding global warming will cause ecocide and our own extinction

In Search of Lost Cultures: Books 1987

Shaun O\u27Connell reviews a number of books whose focus is the loss and tenuous preservation of cultural values. He detects signs of a cultural crisis in which literature and American life are increasingly detached and disturbing indications of a loss of national consensus, of trust, and perhaps of polity itself. Two hundred years after the signing of the Constitution, he writes, in this year of celebration, we learned in minute detail of the Iran-Contra deceits and duplicities, of government by secret White House junta having replaced the rule of law. Most dismaying of all, we did not appear to be unduly upset by these sordid revelations. This, of course, creates the need for yet another context

Good-bye to All That: The Rise and Demise of Irish America

The works discussed in this article include: The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley 1874-1958, by Jack Beatty; JFK: Reckless Youth, by Nigel Hamilton; Textures of Irish America, by Lawrence J. McCaffrey; and Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O\u27Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, by James M. O\u27Toole

The Vision Thing

In The Vision Thing, Shaun O\u27Connell reviews a number of books whose subject matter is not merely the presidential election of 1988, but the impact of image politics in the age of the thirty-second sound bite. He quotes Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product information so that it can do its psychological work of [pseudotherapy], image politics empties itself of authentic political sustenance for the same reason. The works discussed in this article include: All by Myself: The Unmaking of a Presidential Campaign, by Christine M. Black and Thomas Oliphant; The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed, by Barbara Ehrenreich; The Quest for the Presidency: The 1988 Campaign, by Peter Goldman, Tom Mathews, and the Newsweek Special Election Team; Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars? The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency, 1988, by Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover; What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era, by Peggy Noonan; The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath, by Kevin Phillips; and My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan, by Nancy Reagan, with William Novak

Two Nations: The Homeless in a Divided Land

The works discussed in this article include: Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, by Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall; Why Americans Hate Politics, by E. J. Dionne, Jr.; A Far Cry from Home: Life in a Shelter for Homeless Women, by Lisa Ferrill; Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics, by Suzanne Garment; Songs from the Alley, by Kathleen Hirsch; Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, by James Davison Hunter; Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, by Jonathan Kozol; Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government, by P. J. O\u27Rourke; Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness, by Peter Rossi; Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, by Luc Sante; The Disuniting of America: Reflections on A Multicultural Society, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.; Louder Than Words, edited by William Shore; and Voices Louder Than Words: A Second Collection, edited by William Shore

Imagining Boston: The City as Image and Experience

I want to discuss community and imagery, social division and literary unity, Boston poetry and prose. In most issues of NEJPP I will focus upon those recent books that fire our imaginations and help us shape our sense of local and regional place. In this issue, however, I want to look back at the tradition of imagery that resonates in Boston\u27s history. Old ideas of Boston are quickly being buried under layers of architectural and cultural renewal. While the suburbs become more urbanized and the commuter roads more clogged, downtown Boston is in the midst of the greatest building boom since after the fire of 1872. The graceful, Florentine Custom House, once Boston\u27s tallest building, will soon be overshadowed by the massive International Place complex, just as the Bulfinch State House has long been crowded by glass boxes along Boston\u27s skyline. The new Boston seems aggressive, glitzy, pricey, a consumer\u27s fortress, like the vast mall-and-hotel complex called Copley Place. Still, other less looming images of Boston persist, as Henry James discovered after he found his home on Ashburton Place razed, and as Robert Lowell discovered amid the rubble of the excavations for the garage under the Boston Common. Boston\u27s real treasures, finally, are not its buildings but the images of permanence created in James\u27s American Scene, Lowell\u27s For the Union Dead, and many other works. In this issue of NEJPP it would be timely to look back at that informing body of imagery. Only by knowing who we have been can we possibly understand who we are and how each of us is linked to ideas of place, this place: Boston

Important Places

The author talks about his time and associations with the University of Massachusetts Boston. He also describes Ireland and his family\u27s roots there and how it connects with Boston as well as his life in New York. This article originally appeared in a 2005 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 20, Issue 2): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol20/iss2

Book Reviews: Divided Houses

These books are an odd lot, landscapes and structures of eccentric designs: (1) a collection of stories by Frank Conroy, his first book since Stop Time (1967). Where Stop Time was a detailed, narrative autobiography that read like fiction, Midair is an often generalized, fragmented fiction with obvious autobiographical implications; (2) the weird diary of Arthur Crew Inman, over 1,600 pages of his often vile obsessions, handsomely edited and curiously published by Harvard University Press; (3) a study of nuclear anxiety over five decades, in the form of a polemical novel, by Tim O\u27Brien; (4) a collection of poems, also centered upon nuclear anxiety, by Maxine Kumin. And finally, two works that vivify social and aesthetic inquiry with the devices of fiction: (5) an intensely local epic on the Boston controversy over school integration, by J. Anthony Lukas; (6) a study, from the bare ground up, of a house built in Amherst, Massachusetts, written by Tracy Kidder. Each of these books sets out to embody and assess American civilization by evoking an appropriate emblem. Most of these writers bend their forms to fit the shapes of unique visions; however, read together, the works suggest strikingly similar concerns that update what Perry Miller called the New England Mind and that hint at the state of the nation