44 Dublin Made Me - Hardcover

Sheridan, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0754013596 ISBN 13: 9780754013594

Publisher: Chivers, 2000

Synopsis

It is half an hour before midnight in the early 1960s and snow coats the cramped, gray streets of Dublin. On the rooftop of 44 Seville Place, a ten-year-old boy clings to the steel rod of a television antenna. When his father urges him to turn the antenna toward England, the boy reaches up and pictures from a foreign place beam into their home. And our young hero, Peter, and his family will never be the same again. As the tumultuous 1960s unfold, the Sheridan family--Ma and Da, Frankie, the baby, Shea (later to be known to the rest of the world as Academy Award-winning film director Jim Sheridan)--forges ahead into the unknown. Young Peter experiences all of life's mysteries--sex, music, The Beatles, loss, survival, drugs, the Troubles erupting just 60 miles away in Belfast, and above all, the seductive power of the theater. In this evocative and masterful portrait, we become a member of this charming and loving family as we explore the Dublin that shapes this young boy.
"--Sharp, jazzy, hilarious and often painful . . .You'll rejoice in this wild song of a book."--Frank McCourt

About this title

Review:

Theater director Peter Sheridan's bracing memoir is timelessly Irish in its lyrical, word-drunk portrait of a boisterous family touched by tragedy: his younger brother, Frankie, died, aged 10, from a brain tumor. The book is also very much a document of the 1960s. It opens on New Year's Eve as 10-year-old Peter and his Da struggle to install a roof antenna: "Half an hour into 1960 we all sat staring at the television." The television goes on to play a major role in the Sheridans' perceptions of life beyond 44 Seville Place, Dublin, particularly when the Troubles explode across the border in Northern Ireland, their mother's birthplace. Rock & roll provides the soundtrack of Peter's youth, though theater becomes the lifeblood for him and older brother Shea (better known now as film director Jim Sheridan--My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father). Ending with the decade's last New Year's Eve, as he prepares to enter Trinity College, Sheridan closes a complex but seamless circle of metaphors and themes. His father finds the part necessary to fix their ancient TV, and when the family hears Da singing "Frankie and Johnny" in the bath for the first time since their Frankie's death, they know they have survived. --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Peter Sheridan is the cofounder (with his brother, Jim Sheridan) of the Project Theatre Company in Ireland. He has worked for many years as a director at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In the U.S. he has directed at the Irish Arts Center and the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, the Los Angeles Theater Center, and the Live Oak Theater in Austin.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chivers
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0754013596
• ISBN 13: 9780754013594
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464