The Road to McCarthy: Around the World in Search of Ireland - Softcover

McCarthy, Pete

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007162138 ISBN 13: 9780007162130

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2005

Synopsis

Pete McCarthy established one cardinal rule of travel in hisbestselling debut, McCarthy's Bar: "Never pass a bar withyour name on it." In this equally wry and insightful follow-up,his characteristic good humor, curiosity, and thirst for adventuretake him on a fantastic jaunt around the world in search of hisIrish roots -- from Morocco, where he tracks down the unlikelychief of the McCarthy clan, to New York, and finally to remote Mc-Carthy, Alaska. The Road to McCarthy is a quixotic and anything-but-typical Irish odyssey that confirms Pete McCarthy's status asone of our funniest and most incisive writers.

About this title

About the Author

Pete McCarthy was born to an Irish mother and an English father. He is a hugely popular British television personality and the author of the critically acclaimed international bestseller McCarthy's Bar. He is also a recent winner of the British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year Award and the Irish Post Award for Literature.

From Publishers Weekly

In the bestselling McCarthy's Bar, McCarthy had one rule: never pass a bar with your name on it. In Road it's: never pass a part of the world with your name in or on it. Thus this genealogist-cum-pint-swilling adventurer embarks on a frolicsome, drunken globe-trot to uncover the roots of all things McCarthy and in the process expose what it means to be a McCarthy and, by extension, to be Irish. It's a lively, lusty quest; McCarthy travels like a Renaissance explorer with a film director's lens. In Tangiers, he finds a Moroccan McCarthy who puts a unique spin on the term "black Irish." He takes in America's premier Irish event, New York's St. Patrick's Day Parade (which he finds more Celtic and American than Irish and not a little Scottish besides). Next stop: Tasmania, the penal colony where so many Irish were sent by the British government. And how could he resist a visit to the town of McCarthy, Alaska, population 18? The ultimate mocking tour guide with acerbic charm, McCarthy delivers scathing critiques of people and places, himself included. His droll and often drunken existentialist view proffers a unique (and distinctly Irish) perspective on the world that is part history, part McCarthy's Law. Some may be put off by his frequent references to drugs, sex and overimbibing, but McCarthy is like a character out of contemporary Irish literature, a traveler on a winding road surrounded by life's imperfections yet finding them beautiful despite it all (especially after a pint or two). Photos, maps.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0007162138
• ISBN 13: 9780007162130
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368