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New books recall JFK’s trip to Ireland and best New England crime stories of 2011

The Word On The Street

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 08, 2012|By Jan Gardner

The crowds in Cork, Ireland, swarmed around President Kennedys motorcade… (ROBERT KNUDSEN/OFFICE…)

President John F. Kennedy’s advisers weren’t in favor of a trip to Ireland in the summer of 1963. There was plenty going on at home, especially in the South where the civil rights movement was under fire. Yet Kennedy insisted on adding a stop in Ireland after a visit to Berlin. The speech he made in Berlin in which he proclaimed “Ich bin ein Berliner’’ (“I am a Berliner’’) is one of his most famous but his stay in the homeland of his ancestors was extraordinary in its own way.

In “JFK in Ireland: Four Days That Changed a President’’ (Lyons), Irish journalist Ryan Tubridy offers a colorful account, knitting together dozens of photographs that illustrate Kennedy’s rock-star status in Ireland. A half-dozen women hang out of a window in Cork, reaching to shake Kennedy’s hand. A distant cousin kisses him on the cheek during a visit to her home, a shot that was on the front page of papers throughout Ireland the next day. Crowds press forward as the presidential motorcade inches along.

The great-grandson of Irish immigrants, Kennedy was the first Irish-Catholic to be elected president of the United States. Tubridy writes that “anyone of a certain vintage in Ireland can tell you where they were and what they were doing’’ when Kennedy was killed in Dallas in November 1963. A day later, the request from Jacqueline Kennedy arrived: Could the Irish army cadets who performed a drill that summer for her husband do so again at his funeral? The young men, some of them 18 years old and on their first trip abroad, were members of the first foreign army to form an honor guard at the graveside of an American president.

In a letter Mrs. Kennedy wrote the following January, she thanked Ireland’s president for attending her husband’s funeral and for bringing the cadets “who had moved him so a few months before in Ireland - and who then moved the world at his grave.’’

Crime and Great Recession

As the economy goes so go the villains. That’s what Barbara Ross, co-editor of the newly published “Dead Calm: Best New England Crime Stories’’ (Level Best), has noticed. The editors of the annual anthology have issued a call for crime and mystery stories by New England writers every year since 2003. In 2010, revenge stories focused on laid-off or fired workers. In 2011 there was an onslaught of stories centered on banks and insurance companies that received government bailouts. Ross adds, “Of course, good, old-fashioned revenge - against abusive, controlling, cheating or just plain annoying spouses, problematic in-laws, treacherous friends, etc., are evergreen and appear in both editions (and all the previous ones).’’

Coming out

“The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics’’ by Thomas Byrne Edsall (Doubleday)

“Gideon’s Corpse’’ by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Grand Central)

“I Got This: How I Changed My Ways and Lost What Weighed Me Down’’ by Jennifer Hudson (Dutton)

Pick of the week

Jean-Paul Adriaansen of Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, N.H., recommends “The Orphan Master’s Son’’ by Adam Johnson (Random House): “In this captivating dystopian novel, Pak Jun Do survives the great famine and becomes a kidnapper of foreigners and a national hero. But in North Korea even a slip of the tongue can precipitate a fall from grace. The only person Pak Jun Do loves is a movie star, the wife of a general to whom she was given as a present. Although he carries her picture literally on his heart, she is unaware of his love until . . .’’