This is the tale of Edward Flanagan, a young Irish lad shepherding a flock of sheep on a farm in Ballymoe, who became the famed Father Flanagan, founder of America's Boys Town, guardian of thousands of orphaned, neglected, and abandoned boys, and advisor to presidents. From a large Irish family, Flanagan suffered through ill health and setbacks to pursue his desire to join the priesthood. Following his older brother and fellow priest to the plains of Nebraska, he served several parishes and opened a hotel for homeless men before finding his life's mission to care for and give a voice to young boys whom society had despaired of and cast aside. Father Flanagan opened his home in 1917 for boys of any race and creed. In this definitive biography, the authors recount his struggles with drought, fire, lack of funds, and skeptical citizens to create a safe haven for these boys. He welcomed Hollywood to Boys Town to recount his story in two films, sent off scores of his boys to do battle in World War II, and toured the orphanages of Asia and Europe to report on the needs of children victimized by that war. At the time of his death in 1948, Father Flanagan was seen as one of the world's foremost advocates for children, especially those without parents or relatives to care for them and those judged guilty of some crime and locked away in reform schools or prisons. The legacy of Father Flanagan is one that inspires all who care for the welfare of children today.

In his quintessential biography of Father Edward J. Flanagan, author Father Clifford Stevens paints an insightful, inspirational and enlightening portrait of the man who founded Boys Town and led a cultural revolution that forever changed the way children were viewed, valued, and cared for in society. Father Flanagan was a complex human being, greatly influenced by his upbringing in a loving, close-knit family, and by the countless teachers, priests, relatives, friends, and recipients of his kindness who guided and nurtured his life's journey. Father Stevens, a former Boys Town youth who knew the legendary priest, captures those experiences - the milestone moments that made the man - to create a compelling story of Father Flanagan's 61 years on earth.

In 1917, Father Edward J. Flanagan founded his Home for Boys. But it became far more than a simple home for orphans because of the unique character and bold, forward-looking principles of its founder. As the reputation of Boys Town grew, Flanagan became a fierce advocate for children on the national and then international stage. In the words of Flanagan and others, this book recounts his defense of the disadvantaged in many settings - children from abusive or neglectful homes, African-Americans excluded from full rights of citizenship, young boys and girls "sentenced" to the notorious Irish industrial schools, interned Japanses-American families, and World War II orphans. The remarkable story of Father Flanagan is a legacy that has the power to inspire and instruct us yet today.

It’s not your father’s Ireland. Not anymore. A story of modern revolution in Ireland told by the founder of IrishCentral, Irish America magazine, and the Irish Voice newspaper. In a May 2019 countrywide referendum, Ireland voted overwhelmingly to make abortion legal; three years earlier, it had done the same with same-sex marriage, becoming the only country in the world to pass such a law by universal suffrage. Pope Francis’s visit to the country saw protests and a fraction of the emphatic welcome that Pope John Paul’s had seen forty years earlier. There have been two female heads of state since 1990, the first two in Ireland’s history. Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, an openly gay man of Indian heritage, declared that “a quiet revolution had taken place.” It had. For nearly all of its modern history, Ireland was Europe’s most conservative country. The Catholic Church was its most powerful institution and held power over all facets of Irish life. But as scandal eroded the Church’s hold on Irish life, a new Ireland has flourished. War in the North has ended. EU membership and an influx of American multinational corporations have helped Ireland weather economic depression and transform into Europe’s headquarters for Apple, Facebook, and Google. With help from prominent Irish and Irish American voices like historian and bestselling author Tim Pat Coogan and the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, A New Ireland tells the story of a modern revolution against all odds.

“Death of a River Guide makes good on a truly soaring ambition and flirts with literary greatness. . . . An indelible vision of how surely the history of a land plays its part in shaping the interior landscape of the human beings who occupy it.” —The Chicago Tribune With Death of a River Guide, Richard Flanagan gives us an extraordinary novel as sprawling and compelling as the land and people it describes. Beneath a waterfall on a remote Tasmanian river, Aljaz Cosini is drowning. Beset by visions, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears. He sees his father, Harry, burying his own father, Boy. He sees Boy himself as a young man, and his Auntie Ellie, chased by a cow she believes is a Werowa spirit. In the waters that rush over him Aljaz finds a world where his story connects to family stories that are Aboriginal, Celtic, Italian, English, Chinese, and East European—what he ultimately discovers in the flood of the past is the soul history of his country.

Winner of the Commonwealth Prize New York Times Book Review—Notable Fiction 2002 Entertainment Weekly—Best Fiction of 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Review—Best of the Best 2002 Washington Post Book World—Raves 2002 Chicago Tribune—Favorite Books of 2002 Christian Science Monitor—Best Books 2002 Publishers Weekly—Best Books of 2002 The Cleveland Plain Dealer—Year’s Best Books Minneapolis Star Tribune—Standout Books of 2002 Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison, only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled. Acclaimed as a masterpiece around the world, Gould’s Book of Fish is at once a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia and a contemporary fable, a tale of horror, and a celebration of love, all transformed by a convict painter into pictures of fish.