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"A journey into our own psyche.... Tim Pat Coogan has dug, Heaney-like, into the past while opening doors to faraway places." - Frank McCourt
"Tim Pat Coogan manages to find "the story" in almost every country he has visited. This volume will stand as a challenging and controversial work..." - Dermot Keogh, "The Irish Times"
"Tim Pat Coogan manages to find "the story" in almost every country he has visited. This volume will stand as a challenging and controversial work..." - Dermot Keogh, "The Irish Times"
Books Ireland
'...long-awaited account of the Irish Diaspora is the most far-reaching and comprehensive study of that phenomenon ever written.’
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
One of the most amusing moments in this book is where the author is asked for some of his books by someone wanting to find out about Irish history, only to reject them as "propaganda" when he finds out they are published in Britain.
It's a worry he needn't have had, as this is a wonderfully fair-minded and even-handed account of the Irish diaspora, filled with charming anecdotes like the one above.
The author sets himself a monumental task; like a coffin-ship captain during the famine, he has to decide who to leave in and who to leave out, sometimes this results in biblical lists of people who are household names only in their own communities, which is the books biggest weakness.
This is an optimistic books with a positive outlook on the future of the Irish diaspora and of Irish relations with Britain. Though the author's colours are nailed firmly to the nationalist mast and he reminds us more often than is necessacary what a bogus, vapid ideology "loyalism" is, he recognises the complexities of Anglo-Irish relations and their long, tangled history.
Ranging in scope from Patagonia to Japan and from the era of medieval monks to that of the World Wide Web, this is a major, impressive, necessacary work.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I bought this book for a friends 60th birthday. He lives in Australia. I have given copies of this to many of my xpat friends.
Home thoughts from abroad and all that.
Home thoughts from abroad and all that.
7 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Tim Pat has embarked on a circumnavigation of the globe in search of the great and not so great who have strayed far from the shores of the Auld Sod.
I thought that "Wherever Green is Worn" was a turgid and badly executed piece of popular history. The idea itself was fine, but Tim Pat is unable to give a clear and lucid description of anything, preferring instead the path of sentimentalism and ill-informed opinion, as best exemplified by his sustained attack on Ruth Dudley-Edwards (another author I'm no great fan of)... his constant references to dinners given in his honour by various eminences grises and his continuous haranguing of loyalism grate on the reader after a very short while. Too much of this book is wasted with TPC's efforts to portray himself to all and sundry as a typically Irish, garrulous, hale-fellow-well-met type.
There are two main problems with the book. Firstly, the prose itself is poorly written, in the style of a red-top op-ed piece. Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, TPC fails to properly analyse the motivations, beliefs, opinions and thoughts of his subject population. Where he attempts to do so, he inevitably fails, resorting instead to the kind of brash sentimantalism which makes everyone in Ireland cringe.
I suppose the effort he put into the work should be applauded, but beyond that, I'd save my pennies rather than wasting them on this unctuous tome.
I thought that "Wherever Green is Worn" was a turgid and badly executed piece of popular history. The idea itself was fine, but Tim Pat is unable to give a clear and lucid description of anything, preferring instead the path of sentimentalism and ill-informed opinion, as best exemplified by his sustained attack on Ruth Dudley-Edwards (another author I'm no great fan of)... his constant references to dinners given in his honour by various eminences grises and his continuous haranguing of loyalism grate on the reader after a very short while. Too much of this book is wasted with TPC's efforts to portray himself to all and sundry as a typically Irish, garrulous, hale-fellow-well-met type.
There are two main problems with the book. Firstly, the prose itself is poorly written, in the style of a red-top op-ed piece. Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, TPC fails to properly analyse the motivations, beliefs, opinions and thoughts of his subject population. Where he attempts to do so, he inevitably fails, resorting instead to the kind of brash sentimantalism which makes everyone in Ireland cringe.
I suppose the effort he put into the work should be applauded, but beyond that, I'd save my pennies rather than wasting them on this unctuous tome.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Freeloading my way around the world
After reading another description of another dinner or banquet given for Coogan by the exile great and good,you end up thinking,"You tight old sod,why don't you ever buy a meal for... Read more
Published 12 months ago by PygmyTwylyte
Perhaps unfair
I really just dipped in and out of this book which was passed to me by a friend who hated it (and is irish). Read more
Published on 7 Nov 2001 by Clive Pacey
5 for effort, 1 for execution
TPC has obviously spent a lot of time researching for this project, and in this respect it is a valuable source for scholars. However, I have some major caveats. Read more
Published on 10 Jun 2001
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