To prove my blood

by Phillip Brady

"Who would have thought, in 1960, when my brother's birth cramped our row house, expelling Aunt Mary back to Brooklyn, that a fat slice of the century later hers would be the last penny the McCanns would spend?" So begins To Prove My Blood, a memoir as modern Irish-American history charted in the lives of four emigrant sisters and their families. Here, in the voice of one of their sons, the McCanns' passage from Northern Ireland to Brooklyn and beyond is rendered as a series of mysteries rippling from "the long swim back through time."-- book cover