Confessions of a Shanty Irishman [Paperback]

Michael Corrigan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 2002

Confessions of a Shanty Irishman is a memoir of an Irish family, but it is also a portrait of American life. It includes some of the icons of film and music, Brando and Presley.

Product Details

• Paperback: 215 pages
• Publisher: PublishAmerica (April 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159129228X
• ISBN-13: 978-1591292289
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,079,646 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in San Francisco and received an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State. I've been actively involved in theatre, and worked with several theatre and film artists, including Sam Shepard and Peter Coyote. I attended the American Film Institute to study screenwritng. I've worked as a teacher of speech communications and English. I have published six books, and currently, four of them are available through Kindle. I have written extensively about the Irish American experience, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination for the story, "Free Fall." I am also a folk-blues enthusiast and play acoustic guitar. The arts publication, The Scream Online, is currently running stories from my book, These Precious Hours, in serial form.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling, June 10, 2002

By 

Michael Walker (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Confessions of a Shanty Irishman (Paperback)

I began reading the six-page Prologue to get a feel for the work, and I did not stop reading until I had finished Chapter One. I grew up in San Francisco - in a different neighborhood, with a different cultural background, but I was immediately drawn into a family setting that became more familiar and more comfortable the more I read. By the time I finished reading the book, I had begun to feel like a distant relative of the Corrigan family, and I wanted to know more about it.

I think the compelling force of the writing is not so much in its description of characters, but rather in its ability to convey to the reader the emotional web of feelings between and among characters.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Midwest Book Review - highly recommended, March 21, 2003

By 

Laurel Johnson (Kansas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Confessions of a Shanty Irishman (Paperback)

Michael Corrigan has a gift to share. From the erin green covers to the morsels of his memories within them, the author serves himself up to the reader like a meat and potatoes stew. Alternately dark with pathos, then light with sudden bursts of humor, this story lives. The author's way with words is purely Irish, through and through.

His San Francisco home is shared by an old country grandfather who worked hard and proud to make America his home; a calm and sensible grandmother who unfailingly nurtures all three men she loves; and a handsome father who works and pays the bills despite his losing battle with the demon drink. Moving in and out of the Michael's life are kinfolk who are all apples off the same Irish tree, each with their own personality and contribution to the author's childhood memories. A mother who abandoned her Irish Catholic husband and infant in search of fun is an occasional visitor, a mystery throughout the author's life.

Mr. Corrigan cooks up a fine, rich broth with his memories. I was intrigued by his family, his lifelong friends, the nuns who taught him as a child, and the priests who took him from innocent altar boy to a manhood full of doubt about his faith. A genetic love of drink plagues him from early on. His struggle with the Irish Catholic faith is honestly relayed through thoughts or spoken words. And his appreciation of the fair sex is sometimes humorous or sad. But it was the author's relationship with his father that, for me at least, put the shine on this novel. His father dies young, a dissipated remnant of the once darkly handsome charismatic man who raised his son without a mother. The author's memory of that day haunts me:

"The old days of Irish wakes with ice lifted off the corpse for drinks had passed. Now it was only a rosary, and relatives listened to the priest reciting before the open coffin. I wondered if the Vikings weren't right to put the body on a ship and riddle the vessel with fire arrows, rather than lay the body out for morbid viewing. I couldn't accept that plastic-looking empty husk as my father. Thomas. It was too much of a contradiction, a furious denial of what he had been in life. Where was the person who took the wheel of his brother's boat and waved at the home movie lens? When would we hear that warm baritone again with its Bing Crosby resonance?"

Confessions of a Shanty Irishman is selling well and finding an audience. Deservedly so. Michael Corrigan's voice is strong, resonant. I like to think he inherited that resonant voice from his father, and that somewhere in the afterlife, Thomas Corrigan is proud.

Highly recommended.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Michael is a Mick, December 12, 2002

By 

Simon Stander (Costa Rica) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Confessions of a Shanty Irishman (Paperback)

The English and the Irish have a love hate relationship. The Irish hate the English while the English love the Irish. It is fitting, therefore, that an Englishman should review the Memoirs of a Shanty Irishman by Michael Corrigan.
My knowledge of the Irish and Ireland was largely formed in London pubs where my best drinking pals were Irish, but naturally...Thus was developed my stereotyping composed of the following characteristics of the Irish man-child:
1. They talk well.
2. They listen badly
3. They love horses.
4. In dealing with the opposite sex, they confuse the Madonna with the whore and the whore with the Madonna.
5. They drink alcohol in great quantities.
6. They are polite and insolent simultaneously, which is a really neat trick.
7. They are gentle and kind but only when sober.
The Shanty Irishman under review, in this nicely embellished memoir, demonstrates all of the above except one. I leave it to the reader to discover which it is.

This readable piece rattles along as we get to know the son of a San Franciscan postman who grew up in the fifties in the bosom of an immigrant Irish family and who has fought since to be an "American" while insisting on an Irish identity. Michael is a Mick and Corrigan is a peg to hang his life's hat on. Here with all its personal contradictions is the story of the second generation immigrant that wants something more than simply being part of the American Dream; here is the man born in the land of the free who yearns for his real roots.

Buy this book. Read it. Enjoy. Despite its embellishments, it is real, and it is written from the heart. And we know the author has real Irish blood nourished by potatoes (or Murphys as I was led to call them). He now lives in Idaho.