You called a lake next to your family home by one name, and the occupiers gave it another. Egan gives a masterful summation of the place of the indigenous Irish in the years leading up to Meagher’s birth:įor the better part of seven centuries, to be Irish in Ireland was to live in a land not your own. The indigenous Irish population lived on land their ancestors had owned, but which had been taken from them by the English. The Ireland that Meagher was born into was a nation without a country. Meagher was both an exceptional character and one representative of the hundreds of thousands of Irish who would be forced to leave their homeland under the yoke of British oppression. His life spanned three continents and his travels, compelled and compelling, covered thousands of miles in an age of slow moving sailing ships. Meagher was a revolutionist, a romantic liberal dreamer and poet, a heroic fugitive from the world’s most powerful empire, and a Union general in the Civil War. His new book, The Immortal Irishman, may be his finest work yet.Įgan uses the life of Thomas Francis Meagher to tell the story of Irish immigration to the United States during the Civil War Era.

His work has appeared in newspapers and magazines and he is the author of seven books. He has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Timothy Egan, the New York Times columnist, is one of the most accomplished nonfiction writers alive.

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The Immortal Irishman by Timothy Egan