Introduction: Turning Pages

Pages, essays, and books pile up in libraries while pixilated words and paragraphs get packed away on hard disks or float in clouds: permanence versus ephemera. Yet, as underfunded libraries turn into media centers and as digital backup options proliferate, who can tell what pages will last and for how long. These essays have long been stored in volumes of the New England Journal of Public Policy (NEJPP) or made available on the journal’s website. This collection sets them in a fresh context and gives them an opportunity to reach new readers in a format that shows how issues and themes change but never disappear. In thirty years, between 1986 and 2015, I wrote twenty-one essays, reflections on books and topics of public concern for NEJPP. I was pleased when the journal editor, Padraig O’Malley, invited me to collect a selection of these essays for this special issue of NEJPP, allowing me the opportunity and the space once again to explore some crucial issues of the day (war, AIDS, homelessness, the environment) and to reflect on significant places (symbolic cities: Boston, New York, Dublin). Two essays discuss another matter of personal and public concern: Irish American culture through its representative men. I have chosen to include twelve essays here, omitting some that now seem dated in the books discussed. It has been a tense task, rereading essays I wrote some decades ago, but in the end satisfying, for they remind me of the times, tempers, and cultural contexts in which they were composed and they have things to say that I had forgotten I said. My hope is that these essays, granted a second time around, will have worthy things to say to current readers

Important Places (2005)

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. Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 20, no. 2 (2005), article 10

Climate. A Period of Consequence: Environmental Literature of 2006 (2006)

The author talks about the consequences of not respecting the climate and understanding global warming will cause ecocide and our own extinction. Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 21, no. 2 (2007), article 5

Revised Emblems of Erin in Novels by John McGahern and Colum McCann

In “Cathal’s Lake,” a 1996 story by Colum McCann, “a big [Irish] farmer with a thick chest” lives by a lake, “which in itself is a miniature countryside—ringed with chestnut trees and brambles, banked ten feet high on the northern side, with another mound of dirt on the eastern side, where frogsong can often be heard.” In By the Lake, a 2002 novel by John McGahern, an aging Irishman also lives by a lake, another enclosed space of tranquility, as is suggested in the opening lines: “The morning was clear. There was no wind on the lake. There was also a great stillness. When the bells rang out for mass, the strokes trembling on the water, they had the entire world to themselves. TransAtlantic, a 2013 novel by McCann, opens and closes at a cottage on Strangford Lough, an inlet off the Irish Sea in County Down. A woman who lived there evoked its image in a painting: “the cottage itself, the blue half-door open and the lough stretching endlessly behind it.” Symbolic sanctuaries all, though McGahern’s retreat is enclosed, while McCann’s is open to a wider world

Home and Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America (2013)

From the 2013 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.” Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 25, no. 1 (2013), article 10

Boston and New York: The City upon a Hill and Gotham (2006)

This article is about the author\u27s experience with visiting New York during it\u27s rebirth after 9/11. He speaks about the history of both cities and how they have each grown into their own to become places of future enterprise and cultural cohesiveness. Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 21, no. 1 (2006), article 9

Revised Emblems of Erin in Novels by John McGahern and Colum McCann (2015)

In “Cathal’s Lake,” a 1996 story by Colum McCann, “a big [Irish] farmer with a thick chest” lives by a lake, “which in itself is a miniature countryside—ringed with chestnut trees and brambles, banked ten feet high on the northern side, with another mound of dirt on the eastern side, where frogsong can often be heard.” In By the Lake, a 2002 novel by John McGahern, an aging Irishman also lives by a lake, another enclosed space of tranquility, as is suggested in the opening lines: “The morning was clear. There was no wind on the lake. There was also a great stillness. When the bells rang out for mass, the strokes trembling on the water, they had the entire world to themselves. TransAtlantic, a 2013 novel by McCann, opens and closes at a cottage on Strangford Lough, an inlet off the Irish Sea in County Down. A woman who lived there evoked its image in a painting: “the cottage itself, the blue half-door open and the lough stretching endlessly behind it.” Symbolic sanctuaries all, though McGahern’s retreat is enclosed, while McCann’s is open to a wider world. Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 27, no. 1 (2003), article 9

Good-bye to All That: The Rise and Demise of Irish America (1993)

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. Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 9, no. 1 (1993), article 9

Two Nations: Homeless in a Divided Land (1992)

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. Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 8, no. 1 (1992), article 74

Imagining Boston: The City as Image and Experience (1986)

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. Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 2, no. 2 (1986), article 9