The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World - Rilegato

"A brave work whose narrative threads connect the personal, the political and the historical, leaving us with vivid impressions of 'Irish ghosts' in both triumph and tragedy.... It is important to retrieve these immigrant memories because they help us recover and define our identity."
--Tom Hayden, The Los Angeles Times

"The Great Shame is an event, a broad-shouldered integration of personal and national history. As one would expect from this author, the writing is both flavorful and straightforward. Mr. Keneally never brandishes his accounts for their dramatic or cinematic effect. In the style of the best historians, he allows the intrinsic power of the tales he tells and the people who populate his pages to draw the reader into a fully elaborated universe.... The Great Shame puts a fully composed human face on political events and in doing so rises to a high level of humanistic achievement."
--Richard Bernstein, New York Times

"Keneally breathes life and warmth into his Irish heroes...The Great Shame is an epic tale of courage and ingenuity."
--Jay P. Dolan, New York Times Book Review

"Let a master like Thomas Keneally take on this dramatic and poignant chapter in history and it becomes something vivid and heartbreaking and very much alive...The Great Shame is a work of remarkable optimism:  a story that reminds us how often human achievement is measured not in conquest or in riches but in simple survival against the odds."
--Salon.com

THOMAS KENEALLY has won international acclaim for his novels Schindler's List (the basis for the movie and winner of the Booker Prize), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Confederates, Gossip from the Forest, The Playmaker, Woman of the Inner Sea, and A River Town. He is often a visitor to the United States and resides in Sydney, Australia.