Wherever Green Is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating look at Irish throughout the world
Review: Coogan takes on possibly his most adventurous project, as he traces the path of Irish immigrants throughout the world. As always, Tim Pat is thorough and his journalistic syle is very readable. The information contained in "Wherever Green is Worn" is fascinating. Anyone who picks up this book, no matter how much you know about the history of Ireland, will learn something new.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating look at Irish throughout the world
Review: Coogan takes on possibly his most adventurous project, as he traces the path of Irish immigrants throughout the world. As always, Tim Pat is thorough and his journalistic syle is very readable. The information contained in "Wherever Green is Worn" is fascinating. Anyone who picks up this book, no matter how much you know about the history of Ireland, will learn something new.

Rating:
Summary: Worthwhile, but not Coogan's Best Work
Review: Coogan's books are always written in a style that makes for easy reading; this is no exception. If written for his own newspaper, however, Coogan (the editor) might have wondered at some of the errors. The sections on the less known of Irish diaspora settlements were excellent. Coogan's personal contacts and varied and numerous acquaintances enliven all of his work and are evident throughout this book. Any lover of things Irish will enjoy the read.

Rating:
Summary: Ethnic Hagiography
Review: I agree with cead1 and particularly with Charles Murphy in their reviews. Its hard to work out just who could take this stuff seriously and just what the objective was apart from making Irish emigrants like me hope that they never meet a non-Irish person who actually read it.

Its certainly the closest thing to an ethnic hagiography I have ever encountered where all Irish people are either good looking or distinguished or popular or a combination of all three.

His condesending attitude to women (even nuns) is breathtaking as is blanket inclusion of anyone with the remotest connection to Ireland as Irish. I was always happy in the knowledge that Sean Connery is a Scottish actor and that Michael Doohan is an Australian Motorcycle ace. Connery becomes "Scotch-Irish" , (others are Scoto-Irish?) in the pages of this book and Doohan an "Irishman ", not to mention half of Hollywood including Sharon Stone !

But probably the most insulting part is that the author appears genuinely astonished that an Irish person can be successful and influential in a variety of walks of life. Anybody and everybody who basically has a job which does not involve digging holes is listed.

By the way dont try and tip german bank clerks like the author, you might get arrested. I can't imagine the conversation when he left the bank. Christy Moore did not write " From Clare to here" it was Ralph McTell but of course he's English so tough on Ralph.

His discussion of a well known Boston (Irish) gangster who is still today on the FBIs most wanted list beggars belief. The guy is made out to be some kind of Robin Hood who kept the streets of South Boston safe and who is remembered for " giving a puppy to a little boy etc etc ". I hope this revelation gives comfort to his numerous victims.

All of the above coupled with really awful editing adds up to an extremely poor reading experience on a topic that would hold much promise in the hands of a serious writer.

Rating:
Summary: It's Good to be Green
Review: I found this a fascinating and interesting read. There was so much information in it, that I must have taken over two months to read it. It's the sort of book that you could put down for three weeks and then come back at it without a problem. As a person who grew up in Ireland, I had some idea that as a race we had travelled the world but I would not have been aware as to the extent of that travelling and the similar hardships encountered to those who stayed at home. This is a book that every Irish person and I mean that in its broadest sense should delve into. I liked Tim's style of writing. His personal commentary very much added to the experience of reading this book.
Criticisms that I would have would be that the chapters were to long. Also in relation to the Irish churches influence on the world, he was right to highlight the great work done by missionaries but I do feel he could have given more information on the downside,i.e the minority who gave missionaries a bad name, those who ran the orphanages and industrial schools.
Its not to long ago that you would have found signs and notices in former colonial countries stating that "no Irish need apply". The opposite is now the case and most throughout the world are happy to have an Irish heritage. This book will endorse that feeling.

Rating:
Summary: Wherever There's Green(backs) To Be Made
Review: Tim Pat Coogan is one of the most widely read living Irish historians. His books on the IRA and the Troubles are standards, and his critical biography of de Valera has probably forever changed the way Ireland's largest-looming political figure will be seen. Unfortunately, "Wherever Green Is Worn" does not match Coogan's best work. It is sprawling and lacks focus, and this cannot entirely be his fault; despite the book's merits, I can't help but feel that it is ultimately just another rushed attempt by his publishers to cash in on the popularity of Irish culture.

The chief and indisputable strength of "Wherever Green Is Worn" is its ground-breaking sweep. Nobody has attempted this universal an examination of the Irish diaspora, and this becomes both an unassailable strength of Coogan's work and a dangerous pitfall, as I'll explain later. Suffice it to say, for now, that this book is a useful first word on the topic and will hopefully provoke more thorough and concentrated historiographies to fill in gaps and tell the story with more critical focus.

And now, to pickier stuff, because it's crucially symptomatic of the overall way in which Coogan's newest contribution has suffered from the inattentiveness of his publishers at St. Martin's, who really owed their author a better editor than he got.
1) First, there are numerous typos and grammatical errors in the book, with the greatest concentration in the initial pages.
2) Slightly more embarrassing is the misspelling of gratuitous foreign phrases, like the italicized French "trahison des clercs," which Coogan spells two different ways in the course of the book; if you have to throw high-falutin' French phrases around, you really want to get them right.
3) Then, there are errors in the Irish (and I find this more troubling because, as a language working to reassert itself, Irish does not need to be misused in major publications like this one) when in an endnote Coogan inexplicably renders the Irish for "kiss my arse" ("póg mo thóin") as "pogue mo tuin." (I pointed this out in amazement to a friend from Co. Kildare, and his response was, "Of course Coogan doesn't know Irish, he's a Dub!")
4) The discursive tangents are another thing a good editor could have attenuated. Do we need to know that the author's luggage was once lost in Boston, unless there's a point to the story or, at the very least, a punchline? Do such digressions explain why "Wherever Green Is Worn" is swollen out to almost 800 pages?
5) Finally, the page references are dodgy, as if the editors didn't track the changes in pagination through the successive drafts of the book. We are told, on page 386, that Coogan will discuss the nineteenth-century Fenian incursions into British Canadian territory on pages 408-410, but that's not the case. The discussion comes on 390, and Coogan's maps of his own book are useless, most likely thanks to careless editing that failed to account for numbering shifts during production.

This is not even to mention the occasionally chauvinistic posture that peeks out in discussions of women in "Wherever Green Is Worn." "Caroline Marland may have the looks of a top model, but she is Managing Director of Guardian News Ltd," Coogan writes on 129, and I wish this were the only time such a remark were let through (it happens several times in the book). No matter how unnecessary it is, no matter how irrelevant to the topic at hand, we are never spared the observation of an attractive woman.

These are fairly petty criticisms. However, what all of this indicates to me is that nobody took very much time preparing or proofing the manuscript of "Wherever Green Is Worn," and this shows through, painfully. Coogan admits in the introduction that he was compelled by his publishers to write no less than three other books (the better ones on Collins, de Valera, and the Troubles) while researching "Wherever Green Is Worn," and this goes a long way toward explaining why the book feels disjunctive and lacks any cohesion; in fact, many of its most powerful moments are precisely those in which Coogan is able to draw from his more sustained research into de Valera and the Troubles, recontextualized to foreground their impact on the diasporic Irish. As it is, individual episodes are instructive and entertaining, anecdotal though they often are. It's just the bigger picture that feels blurry.

And, ultimately, the question that organizes this book is left disappointingly unanswered: Who are the "Irish diaspora" mentioned in the title? Those who, born in Ireland, later emigrated? Those who were born abroad to Irish parents? Those who, so-called "plastic Paddies" like myself, have an Irish passport but were born and raised outside of Ireland? One of the problems in this book is that EVERYBODY'S IRISH. Because Irishness becomes in "Wherever Green Is Worn" (which turns out to be, well, everywhere) far too broad a concept, it loses any real value as a category. A tighter definition of the driving motif behind Coogan's study would have lent this book much more focus and power.

Rating:
Summary: Village Idiot Historian Strikes Again.
Review: Well, good old Pat's at it again. To apply the term "historian" to him is like describing the Klu Klux Klan as liberal.

His over simplistic atititudes towards Irish nationalism is an affront to the 6 million people who inhabit this island.

This was clearly written for the Irish-American, romantic armchair Noraid supporting nationalist movement which pontificate over a situation over three thousand miles away that they simply are incapable of understanding.Thus they rely on Pat for what they perceive to be the TRUTH as they wish it to be.

If it was left to people like Pat, it would be assumed that the assassination of JFK was a Protestant Unionist plot.