“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.”