RaveThe Wall Street JournalFascinating ... Elevates the personal over the political, indeed over every other dynamic. Ms. Schaap’s book offers a warm and generous account of lingering loss and new beginnings, of long defeat and the shimmering possibilities of hope.
David D. Hall
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThis fake news of liberty, abundance and prosperity found a ready audience, among them members of the religious communities whose long experience of harassment and persecution is narrated so vividly in The Puritans. Mr. Hall’s magisterial work provides a ground-breaking international history of this controversial religious movement as it emerged in the Old World and evolved to shape the New. In constructing his chronicle, Mr. Hall, an emeritus professor at Harvard Divinity School, builds upon a career of extraordinary achievement in this field. His voluminous endnotes compress many decades of wide reading into what will become one of the definitive histories of its subject.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
MixedThe Wall Street Journal...an eloquent meditation ... So far, so conservative. But My Father Left Me Ireland makes some very unexpected moves ... The paradoxical combination of revolutionary politics and conservative nostalgia makes My Father Left Me Ireland a profoundly American book. Mr. Dougherty’s writing grasps toward a stable, contented monoculture, speaking more clearly to the concerns of conservative intellectuals during the Trump administration than it does to an Ireland today moving as fast as possible to shake off reactionary views. Mr. Dougherty’s father may have left him Ireland, but, as this book suggests, it is no longer clear what Ireland represents. My Father Left Me Ireland addresses a problem as much as it posits a solution. For, this book reminds us, belonging is always bricolage. It may be easier to find a father than to find a fatherland.
