Booking PassageBooking Passage

"So, Tom that went and Tom that would come back!" is how Nora Lynch greeted the young American Thomas Lynch in 1970, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the cottage that his great-grandfather - another Thomas Lynch - had left nearly a century before on a one-way ticket to America.
In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Ireland, Lynch has found a template for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish. The neighbors and characters he found there - spinsters and farmers, local heroes, poets, clergy, and corner boys - taught him to look, as Montaigne said we ought, for "the whole of Man's estate" in every man.
Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a guidebook for those whom Lynch calls "fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims" making their way through their own and the larger histories.
A man for whom he was named, his great-grandfather, made the long voyage from Country Clare to America, and Lynch returned the favor by going back a hundred years later, and then many times after that. The result is this combination memoir and cultural study, in which Lynch applies the mind of the outsider who is also the insider to this vast collection of people and conditions of life rolled into what is actually a fairly small space. Those lives carry the larger world back and forth, but they, like Lynch are keenly aware that this is a type of holy ground solid enough to be capable of also holding the profane. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Traces the author's numerous visits to the Ireland community where his grandfather lived one hundred years before, describing his relationships with local farmers, writers, clergypeople, and others and his observations on how the town and its people reflect the larger outside world. 30,000 first prinitng.
Traces the author's numerous visits to the Irish community where his grandfather lived one hundred years before, describing his relationships with local residents and how the town and its people reflect the larger outside world.