This is a collection of short stories that, when brought together, form the picture of a singular life: that of Terry Donegan and his black Irish luck. These are his memoirs—done his way. Told in an off-the-wall stream-of-consciousness writing style, the stories ramble from one topic to another...but always find their way back in the end. Side-splitting anecdotes are interwoven with heart-wrenching stories about sports, life, and doings things your own way—even when that way is stupid. Reading this book is like talking to a buddy in a bar while drinking a beer. Donegan lived a wild, crazy, and fun life, and if he learned one thing, it was that nothing goes quite the way you expect it to. But if you have great friends and a great attitude, you can live a truly great life, be true to yourself, and never back down from anything. Donegan is donating $1 from every book sold to the Michael J Fox Foundation, which is doing such wonderful things to give Parkinson's patients like himself hope. He’s also donating $1 from every book sold to the Navajo Nation. After you read the book, you’ll understand why.

Few countries have been as dramatically transformed in recent years as Ireland. Once a culturally repressed land shadowed by terrorism and on the brink of economic collapse, Ireland finally emerged in the late 1990s as the fastest-growing country in Europe, with the typical citizen enjoying a higher standard of living than the average Brit. Just a few years after celebrating their newly-won status among the world's richest societies, the Irish are now saddled with a wounded, shrinking economy, soaring unemployment, and ruined public finances. After so many centuries of impoverishment, how did the Irish finally get rich, and how did they then fritter away so much so quickly? Veteran journalist David J. Lynch offers an insightful, character-driven narrative of how the Irish boom came to be and how it went bust. He opens our eyes to a nation's downfall through the lived experience of individual citizens: the people responsible for the current crisis as well as the ordinary men and women enduring it.

Caitlin McKenna defied her family to marry her sweetheart, Shane, on the eve of his departure for America. But years passed, with no word from Shane for Caitlin to join him. Now, after eight years, a letter comes. But the man who greets Caitlin in Missouri is a stranger. And, as Caitlin soon discovers, he is a man with a past that includes a son by another woman. A son Shane expects Caitlin to raise. But Caitlin has a few surprises of her own, as the desire that once bound them ignites anew. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish potato had allowed the fastest population growth in the whole of Western Europe. As vividly described in Ó Gráda's new work, the advent of the blight phytophthora infestans transformed the potato from an emblem of utility to a symbol of death by starvation. The Irish famine peaked in Black '47, but it brought misery and increased mortality to Ireland for several years. Central to Irish and British history, European demography, the world history of famines, and the story of American immigration, the Great Irish Famine is presented here from a variety of new perspectives. Moving away from the traditional narrative historical approach to the catastrophe, Ó Gráda concentrates instead on fresh insights available through interdisciplinary and comparative methods. He highlights several economic and sociological features of the famine previously neglected in the literature, such as the part played by traders and markets, by medical science, and by migration. Other topics include how the Irish climate, usually hospitable to the potato, exacerbated the failure of the crops in 1845-1847, and the controversial issue of Britain's failure to provide adequate relief to the dying Irish. Ó Gráda also examines the impact on urban Dublin of what was mainly a rural disaster and offers a critical analysis of the famine as represented in folk memory and tradition. The broad scope of this book is matched by its remarkable range of sources, published and archival. The book will be the starting point for all future research into the Irish famine.

Originally published as a dissertation in 1993, this revised edition of Black Athletes in the Media is a sociohistorical documentation of trends in the characterization of black athletes in the news media. This study seeks to demonstrate and explain the ambiguity and dilemma of black acceptance in the American ideal with respect to black sporting achievements over the Twentieth Century. The evolution of black stereotypes, depictions and generalizations are traced and exposed in contemporary media. With respect to the media as the foremost propagator of the racial stereotype, it has the ability to shape, influence and arouse public opinion through the manipulation of controversial events. As a result, social imagination is thus enhanced by this authority and keeper of social values. The major attention given to black and ethnic athletes by the media represents and reflects a consistent pattern of racial assessments and stereotypical journalistic attitudes.

Returning to the working-class Irish-Catholic community of her childhood in South Buffalo to care for her ailing policeman father, Absalom Kearney joins the police department and begins receiving cryptic messages from a twisted serial killer only to find her investigation stymied by her own colleagues. A first novel by the best-selling author of Empire of Blue Water. 12,000 first printing.

“It’s going to be one hell of a great—everlastingly great—book with humor, tears, fun, emotion, and love,” Judy Garland said of her plans to tell her life story, but she died at the age of forty-seven before seeing it through. Judy Garland on Judy Garland is the closest we will likely come to experiencing and exploring the legend’s abandoned autobiography. Collecting and presenting the most important Garland interviews and encounters that took place between the years 1935 and 1969, this work opens with her first radio appearance under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and concludes with her last known interview, one taped for Radio Denmark just months before her death. What makes this collection unique and distinguishes it from the plethora of Garland biographies is that it places Judy in the role of storyteller. She wrote a number of essays for various publications and sat for countless print, radio, and television interviews. These and other autobiographical efforts she made are proof that Judy Garland wanted her story told, and wanted it told in her own words. Finally, forty-five years after her death, here it is. Randy L. Schmidt is the author of the acclaimed bestselling biography Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter and the editor of Yesterday Once More: The Carpenters Reader. He has also written articles for the Advocate and the Observer. He teaches music in Denton, Texas.