...stirring and magnificent...Egan combines deep reporting with masterful storytelling to chronicle this bigger-than-life figure. In the last chapter, he uses his reporting skills to bring new evidence to explain how Meagher died, which has always been surrounded by mystery.
Thomas Meagher’s is an irresistible story, irresistibly retold by the virtuosic Timothy Egan in The Immortal Irishman, which is not the first life of the long-neglected swashbuckler but certainly ranks as the most sweeping...The author tells Meagher’s exhilarating story with an Irishman’s flair for the tragic, poetic and dramatic. But he habitually gilds the lily by inserting what seem like stage directions, using italics to present imagined ruminations and explications.
Egan has a gift for sweeping narrative — he moves briskly through the Great Hunger, the open-air prison that was Australia, the Civil War — and he has a journalist’s eye for the telltale detail...This is masterly work.
