We Irish and Americans
(W.W. Norton & Company, June 1, 2005)
Click Here to Purchase Booking Passage
Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a brilliant, often comedic guidebook for those whom Lynch calls "fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims" making their way through their own and the larger histories. A writer's returning to the old country reveals the binding ties of family, faith, language and home-place -- the precious and perilous nature of tribe and "people" and ethnicity.
"So, Tom that went and Tom that would come back!" That is how Nora Lynch greeted the young American in 1970, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the cottage that his great-grandfather-another Thomas Lynch-had left nearly a century before on a one-way ticket to America.
In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Ireland, Thomas Lynch has found a template for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish. The neighbors and characters he found there-spinsters and small farmers, local heroes and poets, clergy and corner boys-have taught him to look, as Montaigne said we ought, for "the whole of Man's estate" in every man.
Thomas Lynch is the author of The Undertaking, which won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Bodies in Motion and at Rest won The Great Lakes Book Award. Of his three collections of poems, Still Life in Milford is most recent. For thirty years he has been the funeral director in Milford, Michigan. He divides his time between homes in Michigan and West Clare.
Part travelogue, part cultural study, part memoir and elegy, part guidebook for what Lynch calls "fellow pilgrims working their way through their own and the larger histories." In the three decades since that first landing and in dozens of return trips to Moveen, Lynch learned to look for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish.
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Reviews:
Front Row: Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans
Book Review: Thomas Lynch Booking Passage The Irish Review of Books - October 2005
Poetry Daily Prose Feature: Thomas Lynch, Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans
MARTA SALIJ BOOKS: Strolling toward insight
KQED | Forum: Thomas Lynch - Booking Passage
Undertaking a journey home to Ireland
New York Times - 'Booking Passage': Sublime and Treeless
At Home Abroad: Irish in America
Booking Passage - Thomas Lynch
From Milford to Moveen Essayist, poet, undertaker Lynch explores his roots
"Booking Passage": An Irish way of storytelling
Independent Online Edition: The poet undertakes a reviving journey home
Guardian Unlimited: Home thoughts from Detroit
Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Lynch has his finger on the bloody pulse of creation, and what makes him such a fine essayist is that it's just the business of everyday life and death to him."
New York Times Book Review
"Lynch shows himself to be a master of the essay … he speaks eloquently in the voice of both poet and undertaker."
Library Journal Review
"You might think that revisiting Ireland has been done to death in the rush to publish following Angela's Ashes, but think again- poet/essayist Lynch is always excellent. With a seven-city tour."
Bret Lott, author of A Song I Knew by Heart and Jewel
"With Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans, Tom Lynch proves yet again why he is one of the most important writers in the English language. Whether writing of the wonders of indoor plumbing added to his ancestral home in County Clare, or of a solemn funeral procession in the American desert southwest, or of a young man's quest for a job in Dublin, Mr. Lynch reveals time and again, in a voice riven with joy and sorrow and, above all, wisdom, what it means not just to be American or Irish, but human. I wish Tom Lynch wrote more books, because no matter what he writes-whether essays or poems-I am made better for it."
Dennis O'Driscoll
"Booking Passage touches on Irish-American themes which are so fundamental that one wonders why they haven't been explored this revealingly until now. But, then, who else could match Thomas Lynch's perfect balance of American buoyancy and deflating (not to mention self-disparaging) Irish wit, tempering Irish doom with American optimism, romantic Irishness with American realism? The result is a book precisely true to the temperament and temperature of Irish-American relations, the annals of a master."
Alan Ball (Creator of Six Feet Under) Quotes: "I cannot claim credit for the premise of SFU. The idea of doing a show about a family-run funeral home was pitched to me by Carolyn Strauss of HBO. She had just finished reading The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford, a non-fiction book about the "death-care industry" first published in the 1960s, and was fascinated by the world of funeral homes. In my research, I also read the Mitford book, but the books I found most helpful were The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade and Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality, both by Thomas Lynch, a funeral director and poet, and a brilliant, soulful writer. These two collections of essays about life as an undertaker gave me a sense of the tone I wanted the show to have."
