25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
David Monagan is "dead on" in in this book, November 29, 2004
This review is from: Jaywalking with the Irish (Paperback)
My husband and I did a similar thing to David's family--we skipped out on our "happy perfect" lives in a quaint New England town, to give rough and tumble Dublin a go. We've never looked back and David's book is the one we'd write, if we had his eye for a story and his talent for telling it. This man knows of what he speaks, when it comes to capturing the expat life in an accurate and compelling fashion. I am amused to see the American reviews focus, I think, somewhat overly much on the negative sides of the Monagan adventure. If they didn't have mistakes and dark encounters, what stories would they have to tell? Living in Ireland, I read those stores with both recognition but awareness of the hugely compensating postive sides of what the Monagans did. If you have any interest in what it is like for an American family to live in a foreign country, and you want to hear it "told straight", run to buy this book. I read loads of this genre and this is definitely one of the better selections (along with Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik).
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39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Thought-provoking if uneven look at today's Irish disruptions, December 21, 2005
This review is from: Jaywalking with the Irish (Paperback)
Monagan offers a sobering take on how Ireland accepts and rejects his attempts to relocate there in the early 00's. His observations on petty theft, killer (literally) traffic, suburban blight, environmental destruction, binge drinking, relocated romantics, and boorish behavior certainly should correct the sentimentality of many visitors to his adopted city of Cork and its environs. It's rare, it still seems, to find a book outside of the Irish presses that interrogates today's gritty attitudes amidst an unsettlingly glitzy urban Ireland outside of Belfast or Dublin. The book works best when tackling the changes Ireland finds itself in over especially the last ten or fifteen years. Monagan's very good on how Irish conversation draws out the naive outsider to reveal a weakness while the native conversant remains protected, watching but not revealing. He also plumbs the puzzling indifference shown by many Irish today to the loss of their heritage as foreign capital invades and conquers in the name of profit once again.
What hobbles this account are a variety of structural and factual stumbles as he recounts his move. First, how he and his family survive, after renting out their Connecticut house and relocating, remains too unclear, given that David has only free-lance writing to pay the exorbitant food, tuition, tax, and housing bills that anyone living in Ireland is sadly familiar with. How his wife fares with her work is also left too vague. Secondly, parts of this book read as if he inserted his free-lance work (on the Kinsale Old Head golf course monstrosity and on the volunteer rescue brigades) as chapters here rather jarringly. Third, the facts behind the reason for the various pieces sculpture garden at Sneem, the confusion of Knock with Croagh Patrick, and the ignorance that he shows towards not bothering to find out the simple reason the local GAA field is called "Pairc Ui Choamh" show a superficial attention to telling details that a more thorough chronicler would have investigated.
To be fair, the author has corresponded with me since I originally posted this review, and noted, correctly, that to delve too "academically" into the pedantry behind the offhand Pairc remark, uttered by not the author but another man at the match, would take away from the anecdote and interfere with the telling of the whole incident. I agree, and stand corrected. By the way, the author has gone on to stay in Ireland, appear on talk shows, and to pursue his writing career, more power to him.
However, I respectfully wish that he'd have gone further into what could have been intriguing stories. For instance, he raises in one sentence a potentially illuminating example of rural Irish culture on Valentia Island but neglects to develop this further, leaving the reader deflated at the hasty end to a chapter and wondering why he bothered to bring it up, since his time spent exploring there remains enigmatic. Finally, the end of the book stutters and hesitates as he vacillates whether to return to the US for good in the wake of the 2001 attacks. The last portion rushes while the first part had taken its time exploring the first year there. The book ends less than neatly, not knowing when to stop the story. This may be appropriate in reflecting Monagan's divided loyalties, but it does not culminate in a well-crafted conclusion on the page.
I still recommend this as an antidote to the "I bought a B&B/farm and here are tales from the lovable locals I met" genre for its portrayal of anti-American sentiment, threatened cultural and ecological conditions, and intriguing if too brief scenes from rural Co Cork that add to the book's relevance. It's worth comparing to the nearly contemporaneously composed travelogue by British writer Pete McCarthy, "McCarthy's Bar," in its overlapping and concurrent Cork focus. And it recalls in its considerations of Northeast US-Irish upbringing that of another contemporary, Steve Fallon, whose Boston-meets-Connemara journey frames his book "Home with Alice." Like these, "Jaywalking" examines the attempt of Irish Americans to settle in reverse of the usual historical direction, and in its reminders of how delicate the values of Irish life become in an relentlessly consumer-driven and globalized existence into which Ireland has now plunged itself (nearly?) wholeheartedly.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Much more than an "Ireland then, Ireland now" book!, January 29, 2005
This review is from: Jaywalking with the Irish (Paperback)
Written from the perspective of an Irish-American who lived a while in Ireland in the early 70's and then goes back for a longer stay (maybe for life?) in 2000, David Monagan's book walks us through a coming to terms with abrupt cultural changes that have accompanied the economic transformation from nearly third world to top of the heap in a sigle generation. David doesn't hide the pain and the humor of it all as he portrays his process of assimilation and engagement. This is not only a portrayal that some of us fellow Irish-Americans with "Ireland then and Ireland now" knowledege will gain insight from (while enjoying some laughs in the process), but will also help older Irishmen make some "sense" of their socioeconomic revolution.
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