Remembering Ahanagran

Richard White is Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University.

"Richard White gives us a beautifully rendered account of his mother's life, tracing her journey as a young girl from Ireland toward the new identities she forged for herself in Boston and Chicago. Subtly weaving memory and history to suggest how the two reinforce but also challenge each other, Remembering Ahanagran is a powerful meditation on the immigrant experience in America. It is an absolutely wonderful book." - William Cronon

"In this brilliant book, Richard White proves that he is not only one of the finest historians in America but also one of the most eloquent and ambitious. Through a loving but clear-eyed examination of the tales his immigrant mother tells of her early life in Ireland and the United States, he has managed to uncover a host of surprising truths--about his own family, about the complex, often poignant relationship between history and memory, and about what it means to be an American." - Geoffrey C. Ward

"Remembering Ahanagran is a rare and remarkable achievement: a book that carries as great a charge in emotional power as it does in intellectual energy. Sara Walsh's 'memory' and Richard White's 'history' travel through terrain from the most urgent American concerns of immigration and intermarriage to the most elemental, universal issues of love and death. This book gives its readers access to the company of two people with extraordinary gifts for life's basic enterprise: taking in experience, and making sense of it." - Patricia Nelson Limerick

"With equal and equally tender respect for document, memory, and lore, Richard White recreates and joins his Irish and his Jewish ancestry. An extraordinary book." - Lore Segal

4 Black-and-White Photographs/2 Maps

Building history from the rich local folklore of family—an anti-memoir by a leading historian.

Sara Walsh was born in a land of storytellers in 1919, in Ahanagran, in the west of Ireland. She has made her life out of the stories she told her children, from her early years in Ireland to her migration to the United States and her struggle to become an American. Sara's memories, as recaptured in this unusual book by her son, are neither history nor memoir but something larger and brighter than both. Remembering Ahanagran is much more than a fascinating tale of one woman and her family; it is a passionate story that expresses the dignity and excitement of ordinary lives.

The Washington Post Book World - Geoffrey C. Ward

Richard White . . . has here turned his lucent style and empathic intelligence to sifting fact from fiction, history from memory . . . an opportunity for every reader to reflect upon what it means to be a citizen of an ever-changing nation of immigrants.

Richard White, professor of history at Stanford University, is the author of The Middle Ground, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own, and The Organic Machine (H&W, 1995). He lives in Palo Alto, California.