Grappling With Ghosts

From time as a child in an orphanage to writing speeches for presidents, James Harvey traveled a rocky road to live out the American dream.

In this memoir of his childhood, Harvey recreates the strange and remote realities of the daily struggles of life in post-war rural Ireland and bomb-shattered London. Ireland, just 30 years removed from 700 years of British domination, had scarcely emerged from the 19th century. It remained a "priest-ridden, God-forsaken race," in James Joyce's acerbic description. London, meanwhile, shrouded in fog and greasy coal soot with armless and legless veterans everywhere you turned, was the epicenter of an exhausted debtor nation, still clinging to an image of British exceptionalism as a young Queen Elizabeth took the throne and the empire circled the drain.

This engaging memoir grounds the struggles of the Harveys in both Irish history and British snobbery as the family fought for a place in the world amidst the alcohol-fueled domestic violence so common in Ireland's "33rd county," the Kilburn area bordering London's Paddington and St. John's Wood neighborhoods. It takes the reader from the day in 1944 when the author and his twin brother were delivered by their grandmother in a thatched Irish cottage to the day in 1958 when the family climbed aboard a plane for a 14-hour, non-stop flight from London to New York.