Crossing Highbridge: A Memoir of Irish America (Irish Studies) [Hardcover]

Maureen Waters (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 149 pages
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr (Sd); 1st edition (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815606826
• ISBN-13: 978-0815606826
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #469,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #92 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Family & Childhood

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Emotionally Stirring By A Most Literate Writer, June 20, 2001

By 

clare hynes-pope (Bronx, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crossing Highbridge: A Memoir of Irish America (Irish Studies) (Hardcover)

I could relate to nearly everything that Miss Waters wrote about in Crossing Highbridge, because I came from that Irish Catholic enclave, I knew the Waters family long ago, and I went to Sacred Heart with Maureen's sister, Agnes.

Maureen Waters is a gifted writer who combines history, philosophy, religion, and the socio-econimic conditions in a working class environment in the 1940's and 1950's, with utter grace, and at the same time, the reader can experience some strong emotions of saddness and joy.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Happiness and sorrows of a truly literary person, June 20, 2001

By 

clare hynes-pope (Bronx, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crossing Highbridge: A Memoir of Irish America (Irish Studies) (Hardcover)

I was able to identify with nearly everything Miss Waters wrote about her Irish Catholic upbringing in Highbridge, because I too came from the same place, and I knew her sister Agnes many, many years ago. However, if I had not had the privilege of knowing Maureen and her literary family, I would still have been able to appreciate the writer's gift of style where she combined gracefully, history, philosophy, religion along with the socioeconomic conditions of the 1940's and 1950's growing up in Highbridge.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Grief Understood, May 31, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Crossing Highbridge: A Memoir of Irish America (Irish Studies) (Hardcover)

This profoundly moving memoir of growing up Irish/Catholic/female in the midcentury Bronx began with the author's need to understand the loss of her son to accidental death by drugs and alcohol. As she puts it, "the drive to piece together cause and effect was a belief that I had far more power than I actually did for good or ill." She sifts the past out of psychological necessity, desperate, guilty, and finds ordinary treasure: in human characters - her father, an immigrant from Sligo, her mother from Mayo, a feisty and lovable little sister, Agnes, and, above all, in her beautiful and enigmatic lost child of the flaming red hair, Brian Patrick - and also in their brave and lonely human places (Highbridge on Hudson, Long Island). She looks back for clues to her loss from the perspective of a divorced single mother trying to juggle children and hold her own in academe (she's now a professor of English). Memory sifted through the prism of such luminous prose and honest emotion offers a gentle and moving consolation to this reader. The story of the author's Catholic journey, from insider - the parish was Sacred Heart - to outsider is told with devastating brevity. I'll never forget the final image of women's exclusion. It rings so true. The abyss is present in Waters' world, but to me this is a book of hope