The Shamrock

From the streets of wartime Berlin, to the bombed out city of Liverpool, and finally resting in the lush valleys of the Ards Penisula, The Star and the Shamrock from USA Today best-selling author Jean Grainger is a must read WWII saga.

In The Shamrock and the Cross: Irish American Novelists Shape American Catholicism, Eileen P. Sullivan traces changes in nineteenth-century American Catholic culture through a study of Catholic popular literature. Analyzing more than thirty novels spanning the period from the 1830s to the 1870s, Sullivan elucidates the ways in which Irish immigration, which transformed the American Catholic population and its institutions, also changed what it meant to be a Catholic in America. In the 1830s and 1840s, most Catholic fiction was written by American-born converts from Protestant denominations; after 1850, most was written by Irish immigrants or their children, who created characters and plots that mirrored immigrants’ lives. The post-1850 novelists portrayed Catholics as a community of people bound together by shared ethnicity, ritual, and loyalty to their priests rather than by shared theological or moral beliefs. Their novels focused on poor and working-class characters; the reasons they left their homeland; how they fared in the American job market; and where they stood on issues such as slavery, abolition, and women’s rights. In developing their plots, these later novelists took positions on capitalism and on race and gender, providing the first alternative to the reigning domestic ideal of women. Far more conscious of American anti-Catholicism than the earlier Catholic novelists, they stressed the dangers of assimilation and the importance of separate institutions supporting a separate culture. Given the influence of the Irish in church institutions, the type of Catholicism they favored became the gold standard for all American Catholics, shaping their consciousness until well into the next century.

This book is meant for an adult to read to a child. The story is about a lonely teddy bear named Higgins that got separated from his family, the Shamrock Bears, during a terrible rainstorm. The bear meets up with a leprechaun that is searching for his friends, the Shamrock Bears. The two team up to find Higgins’s family. During their journey, they meet many new friends and have some surprising adventures. Meanwhile, the Shamrock Bears are having their own adventure with a silly Coyote named Colin. This story helps children learn the importance of family, friendship, courtesy, and the importance of learning to read.

In Back of the Shamrock By: Doug Lowe East Durham, a small Irish resort town in upstate New York, was the backdrop to an innocent childhood for a tight-knit group of friends. From sledding adventures in the winter to endless summers at the ball field in back of the Shamrock, Frazer, Doc, Ranker, Whiz, and more shared childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood experiences that shaped who they became as men. As the boys become men and eventually go their separate ways, a tragedy brings them together once again and reveals the true strength of their lifelong bond and their unyielding loyalty to one another.

The Shamrock and Peach is a unique book in many ways. It is a cookbook that explores the best of Ulster-Scots cuisine but is also the tale of an immigrant's journey, following in the footsteps of those Scots-Irish settlers who forged the trails of Appalachia years ago. It is a story of the many cultural overlaps that exist between the North of Ireland and the Deep South, celebrating those cultural expressions through the language of really good food. The first half of the book is set in the green fields of Ireland from where we cross the ocean to the American South to discover some wonderful food experiences that have their roots in the Emerald Isle. Filled with beautiful photographs of both regions, this cookbook will be a fun and interesting resource to browse through and use in your kitchen for years to come.