Keneally, Thomas 1935–

(Thomas Michael Keneally)

PERSONAL: Born October 7, 1935, in Sydney, Australia; son of Edmund Thomas and Elsie Margaret (Coyle) Keneally; married Judith Martin, August 15, 1965; children: Margaret Ann, Jane Rebecca. Education: Attended St. Patrick's College, New South Wales.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Curtis Brown, P.O. Box 19, Pad-dington, New South Wales 2021, Australia.

CAREER: Writer and journalist. Trained for priesthood (never ordained); high school teacher in Sydney, Australia, 1960–64; University of New England, New South Wales, Australia, lecturer in drama, 1968–70; New York University, New York, NY, Inaugural Berg Professor, 1988; University of California, Irvine, School of Writing, visiting professor, 1985, distinguished professor 1991–95. Member of Australia-China Council, 1978–88; Australian Constitutional Committee, advisor, 1985–88; Literary Arts Board of Australia, member, 1985–88; Australian Republican Movement, chair, 1991–93, director, 1994–. Actor in films, including The Devil's Playground, 1976, and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1978. Military service: Served in Australian Citizens Military Forces.

MEMBER: Australian Society of Authors (chair, 1987–90), National Book Council of Australia (president, 1985–90), PEN, Royal Society of Literature (fellow), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS: Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowship, 1966, 1968, 1972; Miles Franklin Award, 1968, 1969; Captain Cook Bi-Centenary Prize, 1970; Heinemann Award, Royal Society of Literature, 1973, for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith; notable book citation, American Library Association, 1980, for Confederates; Booker McConnell Prize for Fiction, and fiction prize, Los Angeles Times, both 1982, both for Schindler's List; named Officer, Order of Australia, 1983.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Place at Whitton, Cassell (London, England), 1964, Walker & Co. (New York, NY), 1965.

The Fear, Cassell (London, England), 1965.

Bring Larks and Heroes, Cassell (Melbourne, Australia), 1967, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1968.

Three Cheers for the Paraclete, Angus & Robertson (London, England), 1968, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1969.

The Survivor, Angus & Robertson (London, England), 1969, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1970.

A Dutiful Daughter, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1971.

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1972.

Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1974, published as Blood Red, Sister Rose, Collins (London, England), 1974.

Gossip from the Forest, Collins (London, England), 1975, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1976.

Moses the Lawgiver, Harper (New York, NY), 1975.

Season in Purgatory, Collins (London, England), 1976, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1977.

A Victim of the Aurora, Collins (London, England), 1977, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1978.

Ned Kelly and the City of the Bees (juvenile), J. Cape (London, England), 1978, Penguin (New York, NY), 1980.

Passenger, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1979.

Confederates, Collins (London, England), 1979, Harper (New York, NY), 1980.

The Cut-Rate Kingdom, Wildcat Press (Sydney, Australia), 1980.

Bullie's House, Currency Press (Sydney, Australia), 1981.

Schindler's List, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1982, published as Schindler's Ark, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1982.

A Family Madness, Hodder & Stoughton, 1985, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1986.

The Playmaker, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1987.

To Asmara: A Novel of Africa, Warner Books (New York, NY), 1989, published as Towards Asmara, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1989.

By the Line, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia), 1989.

Flying Hero Class, Warner Books (New York, NY), 1991.

Woman of the Inner Sea, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1992; Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1993.

Jacko the Great Intruder, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1994.

A River Town, Nan A. Talese (New York, NY), 1995.

Bettany's Book, Bantam (New York, NY), 1999, hardcover edition, Doubleday (Sydney, Australia), 2000.

An Angel in Australia, Doubleday (Sydney, Australia), 2002.

Office of Innocence, Nan A. Talese (New York, NY), 2003.

The Tyrant's Novel, Nan A. Talese (New York, NY), 2004.

NONFICTION

Outback, photographs by Gary Hansen and Mark Lang, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England and Sydney, Australia), 1983, Rand McNally (Chicago, IL), 1984.

(With Patsy Adam-Smith and Robyn Davidson) Australia: Beyond the Dreamtime, BBC Publications (London, England), 1987, Facts on File (New York, NY), 1989.

With Yellow Shoes, Prentice-Hall (Tappan, NJ), 1992.

Now and in Time to Be: Ireland & the Irish, Norton (New York, NY), 1992.

The Place Where Souls Are Born: A Journey into the Southwest, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1992, published as The Place Where Souls Are Born: A Journey into the American Southwest, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1992.

Memoirs from a Young Republic, Heinemann (London, England), 1993.

Homebush Boy: A Memoir, Heinemann (London, England), 1995.

The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New, Random House (Milsons Point, New South Wales, Australia), 1998, published as The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World, Nan A. Talese (New York, NY), 1999.

American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles, Nan A. Talese (New York, NY), 2002, published in England as American Scoundrel: Love, War and Politics in Civil War America, Chatto and Windus (London, England), 2002.

Abraham Lincoln ("Penguin Lives" series), Lipper/Viking (New York, NY), 2003.

PLAYS

Halloran's Little Boat (produced in Sydney, 1966), published in Penguin Australian Drama 2, Penguin (Melbourne, Australia), 1975.

Childermass, produced in Sydney, 1968.

An Awful Rose, produced in Sydney, 1972.

Bullie's House, (produced in Sydney, 1980; New Haven, CT, 1985), Currency Press (Sydney, Australia), 1981.

Writing for television, including Essington (play), 1974; The World's Wrong End (play), 1981; and Australia (series), 1987; contributor to screenplays, including The Priest, 1973, and Silver City, 1985; and to periodicals, including New York Times Book Review.

Keneally's manuscripts are collected at the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and the Australian National Library, Canberra.

ADAPTATIONS: Schindler's List was adapted for film by Steven Zaillian for Amblin Entertainment, 1993.

SIDELIGHTS: Well known for his novel Schindler's List, which served as the basis for an award-winning motion picture in 1993, Thomas Keneally has become one of Australia's most distinguished authors. In works characterized by their sensitivity to style, their objectivity, their suspense, and diversity, this "honest workman"—as Raymond Sokolev calls Keneally in New York Times—has explored subjects as diverse as the history of his native Australia and war-torn Ethiopia.

While discussions of Keneally often emphasize his years spent as a seminary student, only one of his novels focuses directly on the subject. In Three Cheers for the Paraclete, his protagonist is a "doubting priest," Father James Maitland, who "runs afoul of the local taboos" in a Sydney seminary. As in many of his novels, Keneally presents his characters objectively and compassionately; priests and bishops are seen in the fullness of their humanity. Richard Sullivan wrote in Washington Post Book World, "Though this admirably sustained novel makes it clear that some structures are too rigid, that the Church is not unflawed in its members, both clerical and lay, and that more windows need opening, at the same time it reveals with fine objectivity that it is human beings who are at fault, each in his own way, Maitland as much as any."

A similar example of Keneally's desire for objectivity is evident in his account of the St. Joan of Arc story, Blood Red, Sister Rose. Bruce Cook of Washington Post Book World claimed Keneally's "intent, in fact, seems to be to reduce her and her legend to recognizably human dimensions." Placing Keneally's Joan of Arc in a historical perspective, Time's Melvin Mad-docks saw her standing between the "Joan-too-spiritual" of the original legend and the "Joan-too-earthy" of George Bernard Shaw. She is "less spectacular than the first two but decidedly more convincing and perhaps, at last, more moving."

Perhaps Keneally's most ambitious historical novel is Confederates, set during the American Civil War and told from a Southern perspective. The book has no central character, but rather focuses on a group of characters who are involved in the preparations for the Second Battle of Antietam, fought in 1862. Keneally "keeps his canvas as vast as possible," wrote John Higgins in Times Literary Supplement, "and his concern is as much with the conscripts as with the captains; the volunteers get just as large a show as the likes of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson."

Several critics found that Keneally's portrayal of the American South is surprisingly realistic. Jeffrey Burke of New York Times Book Review, for example, wrote that it "is almost necessary to remind oneself that the author is Australian, so naturally, intrinsically Southern is the narrative voice." Robert Ostermann of Detroit News stated that Keneally's account of the Second Battle of Antietam "deserves comparison … to Tolstoy's rendering of the Russian defeat and retreat at Borodino and to Hemingway's of the retreat from Caporetto in Farewell to Arms," and added that "the fact that this massive, absorbing narrative is the work of an Australian—not a Southerner, not even a native American—testifies even further to the stature of his achievement."

With the publication of Schindler's List, published in England as Schindler's Ark, Keneally found himself embroiled in a controversy over whether his book was fiction or nonfiction, an important point since the book was nominated for England's prestigious Booker Mc-Connell Prize for fiction. Although the story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist during World War II who saved the Jews assigned to work in his factory from Nazi gas chambers, is historical truth, Keneally wrote the book as a novel. "The craft of the novelist," Keneally explained in the London Times, "is the only craft to which I can lay claim, and … the novel's techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar [Schindler.]" After deliberation, the judges deemed the work a novel and awarded it the Booker Prize in 1982.

The controversy over Schindler's List is understandable. As Richard F. Shepard pointed out in New York Times, the real-life story of Oskar Schindler "is indeed stranger than fiction." The owner of a German armaments factory staffed with forced Jewish laborers from nearby concentration camps, Schindler made a fortune during the war by supplying the German army with war materials. But when the Nazi regime decided to solve the "Jewish question" through mass extermination of Jewish prisoners, Schindler acted to save as many of his workers as possible. He convinced the local S.S. chief to allow him to house his Jewish workers in a compound built on his factory grounds rather than at a concentration camp "so that their labor [could] be more fully exploited," as Schindler explained it. Through the use of bribes and favors, Schindler worked to reunite his workers with their families, provided them with adequate food and medical care, and even managed to get a particularly murderous S.S. officer transferred to the Russian front. When the Russian army threatened to capture the area of southern Poland where Schindler's factory was located—and the German army made plans to execute the Jewish workers before retreating—Schindler moved his company and his workers to safety in German-held Czechoslovakia. By the end of the war, Schindler had some thirteen hundred Jewish workers under his protection—far more than he needed to operate his factory—and had spent his entire fortune on bribes and favors.

Critical reaction to Schindler's List was generally favorable. Keneally, wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in New York Times, "does not attempt to analyze in detail whatever made Oskar Schindler tick," which the reviewer found "a little disconcerting, considering the novelistic technique he employs to tell his story. But this restraint increases the book's narrative integrity. Because the story doesn't try to do what it can't honestly do, we trust all the more what it does do." Jonathan Yardley of Washington Post Book World felt that the book's major flaw is "the author's insistence on employing devices of the 'new' journalism…. But Schindler's List has about it a strong, persuasive air of authenticity, and as an act of homage it is a most emphatic and powerful document." Phillip Howard of the London Times agreed, saying that "the book is a brilliantly detailed piece of historical reporting. It is moving, it is powerful, it is gripping."

In A Family Madness, Keneally again returns to World War II, this time exploring its repercussions upon later generations. The book was inspired by a real-life tragedy in Sydney during the summer of 1984, in which a family of five willingly ended their lives. The author's rugby-playing protagonist, Terry Delaney, goes to work for a security firm owned by a Byelorussian named Rudi Kabbel. Haunted by traumatic memories of his childhood in Russia during the war and his father's wartime journals, which reveal countless horrors inflicted upon his family, Kabbel is mentally unstable. When Delaney, who is married, falls in love with Kab-bel's daughter and fathers her child, the Kabbel family closes ranks—not only against Delaney but against the world. As Blake Morrison explained in the London Observer, "They sell up the business, surround themselves with heavy weaponry, and wait for the new dawn."

Writing in Times Literary Supplement, Michael Wood said, A Family Madness conveys the idea that "even here, in this comfort-loaded and forward-looking Aus-tralia, history will get you one way or another." Wood praised the novel, calling it "an ambitious and successful book that makes connections we need to think about." John Sutherland of London Review of Books, lauded the novel as "better than its applauded predecessor [Schindler's List]" and noted that the nobility of the characters makes a genuine claim on the reader. However, in a review for New York Times Book Review, Robert Towers criticized Keneally's characterization, writing that "the lack of an adequately realized psychological dimension" in the character of Rudi Kabbel "is … crippling to the novel's aspirations."

With the publication of To Asmara, as with Schindler's List, Keneally found himself once again accused of writing, not a novel, but an impassioned journalistic tribute. A fictionalized portrayal of the brutal African guerilla warfare of the 1980s, To Asmara focuses on the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front's struggle to break free from an Ethiopia dominated by tyrants. Assisted by Russian military aid, the Ethiopian army was permitted to commit a form of genocide against the Eritreans, in the course of which Ethiopian troops destroyed the beautiful ancient city of Asmara.

Protagonist and narrator Tim Darcy is an Australian freelance journalist on "loose assignment" from the London Times, "one of those tentative, self-despising dreamers drawn to the empty quarters and violent margins of the West's known world," according to Robert Stone in New York Times Book Review. Stone had high praise for both the character of Darcy and the novel as a whole: "Not since For Whom the Bell Tolls has a book of such sophistication, the work of a major international novelist, spoken out so unambiguously on behalf of an armed struggle." In contrast, Andrew Jaffe, reviewing the book for Los Angeles Times Book Review, took issue with Keneally's advocacy of the Eritrean cause. Jaffe wrote, "The nobility of the rebels shouldn't be the concern of the novelist. His job is to sketch an intriguing story against an exotic backdrop. Keneally forgot to leave his commitment to the cause behind in Port Sudan."

Keneally uncharacteristically moves away from the sweeping panoramas of his earlier fiction and limits the action to the confines of one airplane in Flying Hero Class. Frank McCloud, tour manager for a troupe of Australian aboriginal dancers, finds himself involved in a hijacking on a flight from New York to Frankfurt following the troupe's performance. Describing Flying Hero Class as a "thoughtful and exciting novel," Richard Lipez pointed out in Washington Post Book World that Keneally examines with ease two complex issues: the issue of Israeli security versus Palestinian justice and the issue of the territorial rights of the Australian aboriginal tribe versus U.S. and international mining interests. Although finding some fault with the novel, Edward Hower of New York Times Book Review shared Lipez's positive opinion. "Keneally's people are fascinating, and so are the ideas his plot generates, making the hijacking a metaphor for the complex relationship between the West and the third world peoples deprived of land and dignity," Hower stated, ending his review with the conclusion that "Flying Hero Class gives original insights into the way one man learns to reclaim responsibility for his own fate."

With Woman of the Inner Sea, Keneally returns to his native Australian turf and bases his plot on a real-life incident. In the work, Kate Gaffney-Kozinski, wife of a wealthy construction-empire scion, loses her husband to another woman, and her two precious children to the fire that levels the family's expensive beach home near Sydney. In an effort to forget, Kate boards a train for the interior. The place Kate chooses for her "self-annihilation" is Myambagh, a town built on the hard, flat rock of what was once an immense inland sea. Donna Rifkind, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, wrote that the Australian outback, "with its miles of empty red earth, stringybark and eucalyptus, savage storms and eccentric wildlife, represents more than just external landscape … the fluid unpredictability of the land also mirrors Kate's transformation."

In commending the novel, Rifkind wrote that in "the tragedy of her dead children and her subsequent pilgrimage, Kate represents a nation on a perpetual search for reinvention, a nation hardened by countless histories of hunger, tough luck and untimely death." Susan From-berg Schaeffer echoed Rifkind's praise in New York Times Book Review, commenting that "Woman of the Inner Sea succeeds on many fronts. It is a picaresque and often hilarious adventure story, recounting one woman's unforgettable if improbable travels. It is a series of love stories … and it is a mystery story as well. But the novel is also very much an exploration of ethics."

Drawing on his family background again, Keneally's novel River Town is based on his Irish grandparents' immigration to Australia. In River Town, Keneally relates the experiences of a turn-of-the-century Irishman, Tim Shea, who immigrates to Australia when he tires of the confining mores of his own country. While happy to be rid of the restraints he experienced in Ireland, Tim discovers through a series of adverse events many of the same problems with the social conventions of the Australian frontier. In his new hometown of Kempsey, New South Wales, Tim becomes a community hero when he rescues two children from a cart accident. Shortly after, he finds himself being ostracized by the same community for his opposition to the Boer War—a position which ends in near economic disaster for Tim and his family when town members boycott his general store. As unfortunate events continue to plague Tim, he uncovers more of the very same social conventions he had hoped to leave behind in Ireland.

In general, critics were impressed with River Town. "This is truly a compassionate novel, full of vividly portrayed outcasts," wrote reviewer David Willis Mc-Cullough in New York Times Book Review, noting the characters are "outsiders in a nation of outsiders who are only beginning to define themselves in their new home, people who thought that 'if they traveled 12,000 miles, they might outrun original sin.'" Also finding the novel full of compassion and featuring a well-depicted historical background, a Publishers Weekly contributor concluded that "the story is haunting because it is both commonplace and universal. Keneally looks clearly at moral rot, but he is cautiously optimistic about the survival of good people and the uplifting heritage they bequeath." "Keneally has marvelous descriptive powers," said Detroit News reviewer Barbara Holiday, who praised the author's ability to "[bring] the community alive." Holiday summarized, "Keneally has written an absorbing homespun account of ordinary people who are heroic in spite of themselves."

While reviews of his fiction have been generally favorable, several of Keneally's works of nonfiction have been received with less enthusiasm. In Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish, for example, the author attempts to describe the land of his grandparents. In New York Times Book Review Katharine Weber wrote that "dazzled by his adventure" in Ireland, Keneally fails to discern what is significant and what is not. Peter Conrad, reviewing Keneally's study of Australian independence, titled Memoirs from a Young Republic, for Observer, Peter Conrad cited the author's carelessness, writing that, "Grammar and syntax frequently slump out of control." Many critics would agree that the novel is Keneally's forté. His impressive body of fiction, as Schaffer wrote in New York Times Book Review, "makes convincing the very serious belief that each of us has a necessary place—and that our most important task is to find it."

Keneally's later nonfiction works received considerable praise, however. The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New, published in the United States as The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World, was praised by Mary Elizabeth Williams in a review for Salon.com. Williams considered the book compelling because of "the smoothness with which the author moves around the globe. Observing both the rooted and the scattered, he shows not just how the outside world affected the Irish, but also how the Irish changed the world." Williams called Keneally's "greatest gift … his flair for molding real events into memorable narratives, in the smart turns of phrase that draw the reader into the action."

One of the figures in The Great Shame gets his own book with American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles. Times Literary Supplement reviewer Benjamin Markovits called Sickles "a characteristic object of Keneally's curiosity, a man, like Oskar Schindler, who exhibited the often uneasy relation between public and private virtues. Sickles, again like Schindler, excelled at the particulars of political life, at details and connections—like Keneally himself, whose talents as a writer reflect the qualities that draw him to his subjects."

Biographies of Abraham Lincoln abound, but in Keneally's Abraham Lincoln he touches on undocumented moments, and as New York Times Book Review contributor David Walton noted, "the droll and unusual image." Walton called this an "excellent brief biography." A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Keneally's look at Lincoln "so fresh that one wishes only that the 'Penguin Lives' format afforded Keneally room to say more about this iconic leader. Exemplary and illuminating, even for readers well-versed in Lincolniana."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 27, 1984, pp. 231-234, Volume 43, 1987, pp. 229-237, Volume 117, 1999, pp. 207-252.

Contemporary Novelists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Keneally, Thomas,Three Cheers for the Paraclete, Angus & Robertson (London, England), 1968, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1969.

Keneally, Thomas, Homebush Boy: A Memoir, Heinemann (London, England), 1995.

Pierce, Peter, Australian Melodramas: Thomas Keneally's Fiction, University of Queensland Press (Queensland, Australia), 1995.

Quartermaine, Peter, Thomas Keneally, Edward Arnold (London, England), 1992.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune Book World, December 20, 1980; November 14, 1982.

Detroit News, September 28, 1980; November 21, 1982; May 21, 1995, p. 8J.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1971; July 1, 1972; February 1, 1976; November 1, 1976; November 1, 2002, review of Abraham Lincoln, p. 1591.

Library Journal, February 15, 1995, pp. 122-124; March 1, 1997, p. 87.

London Review of Books, November 7, 1985, John Sutherland, review of A Family Madness,pp. 24-26.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 15, 1989, pp. 2, 13; May 16, 1993, p. 7.

Nation, November 6, 1972.

National Review, April 29, 1977.

New Statesman, September 1, 1972; October 26, 1973; October 11, 1974; September 19, 1975; September 3, 1976; September 9, 1978; January 19, 1979; No vember 2, 1979; September 29, 1985; September 12, 1993.

Newsweek, April 19, 1976; February 7, 1977; June 18, 1979.

New Yorker, February 10, 1975; August 23, 1976; May 23, 1977; May 8, 1978; May 19, 1986, pp. 118-19.

New York Times, April 4, 1970; September 9, 1972; October 18, 1982; November 22, 1982.

New York Times Book Review, September 27, 1970; September 12, 1971; January 16, 1972; August 27, 1972; December 3, 1972; February 9, 1975; April 11, 1976; February 27, 1977; October 14, 1977; March 26, 1978; July 8, 1979; October 5, 1980; September 20, 1987, pp. 7, 9; October 1, 1989, pp. 1, 42; April 7, 1991, p. 9; April 26, 1992, p. 12; April 18, 1993, p. 9; March 16, 1986; April 19, 1992; April 26, 1992, p. 22; May 14, 1995, p. 12; April 14, 2002, Kevin Baker, review of American Scoundrel: Love, War and Politics in Civil War America, p. 11; January 19, 2003, David Walton, review of Abraham Lincoln, p. 21.

Observer (London, England), April 25, 1971; September 10, 1971; November 24, 1974; September 21, 1975; December 14, 1975; September 5, 1976; September 4, 1977; January 21, 1979; October 21, 1979; September 29, 1985, p. 23; September 6, 1987, p. 25; March 10, 1991, p. 60; July 19, 1992, p. 58; September 12, 1993, p. 53.

Publishers Weekly, January 18, 1983, p. 447; August 7, 1987, p. 434; January 6, 1992, p. 60; January 30, 1995, p. 84; April 3, 1995, p. 40.

Spectator, March 1, 1968; November 25, 1972; September 7, 1974; November 15, 1975; September 4, 1976; September 3, 1977.

Time, May 15, 1995, Melvin Maddocks, review of Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans, p. 80.

Times (London, England), August 16, 1968; June 7, 1971; August 28, 1972; February 10, 1975; March 7, 1981; October 20, 1982; October 21, 1982.

Times Literary Supplement, May 7, 1970; April 23, 1971; September 15, 1972; October 26, 1973; October 11, 1974; September 19, 1975; September 3, 1976; October 14, 1977; November 2, 1979; November 23, 1979; October 18, 1985, p. 1169; October 20, 1989, p. 1147; January 29, 1993, p. 28; March 18, 1994, p. 13; May 24, 2002, Benjamin Markovits, review of American Scoundrel.

Washington Post Book World, April 27, 1969; April 19, 1970; August 29, 1971; August 13, 1972; January 26, 1975; February 20, 1977; March 26, 1978; August 31, 1980; October 4, 1981; October 20, 1982; March 24, 1991, p. 8.

West Coast Review of Books, July, 1978.

World Literature Today, winter, 1977; autumn, 1978; spring, 1980; autumn, 1996, p. 1025.

ONLINE

Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (September 13, 1999), Mary Elizabeth Williams, review of The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-speaking World.