Rating: 
Summary: Laugh out loud fun..with insight
Review: It's not often I'm laughing out loud all through a book. As someone toying with an Irish pilgrimage this book has given me things to ponder. McCarthy gets to the heart of what I think a lot of people with Irish ancestors are looking for when contemplating a trip to Ireland...and he's so funny. I enjoyed feeling as if I was traveling while reading. His descriptions of the characters, the decor of the pubs and countryside is great.
Rating:
Summary: Laugh out loud fun..with insight
Review: It's not often I'm laughing out loud all through a book. As someone toying with an Irish pilgrimage this book has given me things to ponder. McCarthy gets to the heart of what I think a lot of people with Irish ancestors are looking for when contemplating a trip to Ireland...and he's so funny. I enjoyed feeling as if I was traveling while reading. His descriptions of the characters, the decor of the pubs and countryside is great.
Rating: 
Summary: Gleeful misogyny with an Anglo-Irish accent
Review: Pete McCarthy and his aging Volvo, known as the Tank, spend a picaresque summer pottering around Ireland, flittering from pub to bed-and-breakfast to pub and back to another pub again. McCarthy's mother was Irish (although he himself was raised in England), and this fact has generated in him an Irish lilt to his prose, if not to his actual voice.
McCarthy's tone exactly captures an Irish skill for simultaneous disdain and affection for everyone he runs across. All tourists, including himself, are faintly (or more than faintly) ridiculous. McCarthy gets chased by cows while out looking for prehistoric Irish monoliths. He gets admonished by priests with spitshined brogans while on a barefoot 3-day fasting pilgrimage. He drinks a lot (a LOT), and for some odd reason, he seems to stop at every Chinese restaurant in Ireland.
If you can overlook McCarthy's paradoxically happy good-humored dislike of almost everything (and you should), you'll find the book funny, appealing, even charming. McCarthy would be a very entertaining fellow to run into at the pub. A perfect read in anticipation or in memory of your own vacation to Ireland.
Rating:
Summary: Funny, acquired taste for an American reader
Review: Pete McCarthy's style quickly reminded me of America's P. J. O'Rourke, who has made a significant contribution to humorous travel writing. McCarthy is English-Irish and his affinity for his roots shows through his writing. He looks for and finds humor in the little things about travel - talk radio, second-hand cars, hitch hikers, tourist traps, off-the-beaten-path finds, bad food, good company, pleasant and unpleasant surprises, nosy hoteliers, apparent (to McCarthy and the reader, at least) ironies, rapid changes in the weather, obnoxious tourists, embedded cultural curiosities, and, well, you get the picture.For an American reader, some of the history, terms, and geographic references are not unexpectedly foreign. Some humor and lessons are lost in the 'translation'. And McCarthy is pretty hard on American tourists in Ireland, although not noticeably harder on them than on other foreigners searching for quaint elements of Irish tradition or cheap land to buy. Hippies, yuppie Englishmen, rich Germans, and other demographic and ethnic groups earn his disbelief and, often, mild contempt. He catalogs the changes he has seen in Ireland in his lifetime, and many of them are not pretty. The Celtic Tiger has lost some of its charm and sold out some of its character to tourism and those eager to buy inexpensive land. Consistently observant, funny and insightful, my one, major negative from the book is that it left me much less likely to visit Ireland. There may still be a chance to save the country from foreign invaders, so I'll do my part.
Rating:
Summary: Your Best Traveling Companion in Ireland!
Review: Pete McCarthy's travel book, McCarthy's Bar: Journey of Discovery in Ireland traces his steps around Cork to the West and other Irish places. He returns to his home where he grew up. He meets intriguing Irish folk and other travelers and shares their outlandish tales. Pete was born in Warrington to an Irish mother and an English father. On his journey he visits relatives in childhood home of Drimoleague, West Cork. He is a writer and performs on Radio & TV including 'Desperately Seeking Something' and 'Travelog' which he won the Travelex Award for Best Travel Writer. This is his first book, and the #1 bestseller in Europe. He's right up there with fellow travelogues, Michael Palin and Bill Bryson.
I acquired this on my recent visit to Ireland. It makes for a good travel companion. It made my trip more memorable. McCarthy kept me entertained with his funny anecdotes, keen observation of what it means to be Irish, exploration and filled with mad craic and some Celtic history thrown in. Some highlights, are his bog standard vehicle he dubs 'The Tank,' he returns to his former home in West Cork to visit relatives. His secret hiding place called 'The Convent.' He meets locals and other travelers as they share their stories. There are pages of hilarious moments and wild episodes of sheer fun. Listing his rules of 'McCarthyism' on travel. No. 8, Never Pass a Bar that has Your Name on It. Upon his encounters he makes references to Jeremy Iron's castle in Baltimore, Eiri Na Greine, a Japanese Irish band with a story that ran in the Examiner: Why Japan is Going Ga-Ga Over all Things Gaelic. I shouldn't mention, but hope it doesn't become another tourist trap-Clonakilty, a picture book Irish town famous for it's black pudding and Michael Collins. Skibbereen the epicentre of the great Famine is one of his quiet moments. To enlighten, No. 3 rule of travel, Never Bang on About How Wonderful Some Unspoiled Place is Because Next Time You Go There. You Won't Be Able to Get In. Speaking of enlighten, let's not get into the three day pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick. Some hilarious references he makes to German tourists desperately being Irish. So they buy Irish homes, fix them up and resale them. His trip from Wales with a couple he meets up with making elaborate sleeping arrangements. He joins them near the carpet underneath a table and ponders the arbitary cruelty of life. How's that for accommadations?
His descriptions of some Co. Cork places & the wanna be Irish in Killarney will always have me thinking I was with Pete myself. McCarthy's Bar is full of vividness and reflects a portrait of a rapidly changing Ireland. For example, Knock, a little village with a little shrine now a huge modernist basilica complex with eighteen self-service holy water fountains with a new airport. So you can fly in, pray, buy stuff & fly out. Anyone out there with a foresight of opening an Indian restuarant around Tubbercurry? Keep that in mind. There's a 'Guns 'N' Roses' florist, world's first paramilitary flowershop. Only in Ireland, right? The sentiments go on and on. All the names associated with Ol' Eire like, the Guinness ads, Daniel O'Donnell, Oscar Wilde, Elvis Costello and U2. It's like being in a Road Movie. I can't wait to read the sequel, 'Road to McCarthy.'
Rating:
Summary: McCarthy has a knack
Review: Some bits were boring but overall this was a very funny book. I am sure it helps that I have been almost everywhere that he traveled to so it was like watching a vacation slideshow. That being said, the best is how he describes tourists from around the globe. Stereotypes????....sure but who cares, he was right on the mark.
Rating:
Summary: A laugh out loud book
Review: Started to read this book, belonging to our hostess, in Ireland. We laughed out loud so much that we ran out and bought a copy of each of Pete McCarthy's books. Not only the funniest book we have read in quite a while, but the insight into tourism, the causes and effects, is enlightening. I had visited Ireland 15 years ago and was amazed at the changes. It has been "packaged" very nicely. The same has happened to many destinations that are being marketed for visitors. Having seen the Orient, South America, Europe and U.S. cities become either generic look alikes or quaintly packaged this book helped me see the humor in the situation. It also made me determined not to delay too long to see any places I have missed before the "facade" is orchestrated. You don't even have to be a traveler to thoroughly enjoy Pete McCarthy's delightful style.
Rating: 
Summary: Cynical Yankee-Bashing 101
Review: The pot-shots at Americans get old real fast, as you can tell he embellishes his run-ins with them for dramatic effect
I found myself skipping over many parts becasue he goes off on cynical rants about everything "not-local" about a place.
Spare us please, there are 270 million of us and we are not all on our first trip out of the country, not all of us have fat, dopey butts, and we are not all from Texas!
If you want to write about the real Ireland stay out of Killarney and Dingle during the high-season....
Rating: 
Summary: Big Disappointment
Review: There are two glaring errors with Mr. McCarthy's book. One, it is in bad need of an editor - not to clear typos or misspelling but because it deviates into irrelevant anecdotes that fail to build around his travels in Ireland. A good editor would have reduced this book into either a magazine article or short story. If he tried to pull off a Joyce's stream of consciousness, a la Ulysses, he fails.
The more troubling error is that Mr. McCarthy incorrectly describes the Irish. Any antipathy that the Irish feel towards the English, whether warranted or not, is perpetuated by Mr. McCarthy's fallaciousness. And just because he spent a few summers in West Cork when he was a child and has an Irish surname does not mean he is an insider as the back cover of his book claims. You are an English tourist, full stop. What's next, a book on Boston because your surname is Irish and you have been to a Paddy's Day parade which qualifies you as Bostonian insider? I wish this book had come with a money back guarantee. Hollywood does a better job at describing Ireland than Mr. McCarthy, and that's not saying much.
Rating:
Summary: Lots Of Laughs & Educational
Review: This is a funny book, but it also provides a lot of valuable information about Irish history, Irish customs and traveling in Ireland. It is very entertaining reading with amusing and useful insight into the soul of the Irish people. The writing style can be a tad scatological, but McCarthy's observations about human nature and the cultural differences between various ethnic groups are refreshingly unpolitically correct and funny. American, Brit and German tourists are all treated with equal irreverence. Anyone traveling to Ireland could do a lot worse than follow in McCarthy's footsteps around the west coast.
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