From time as a child in an orphanage to writing speeches for presidents, JamesHarvey travelled a rocky road to live out the American dream.

In this memoir of his childhood, Harvey recreates the daily struggles of life in post-war rural Ireland and bomb-shattered London. Ireland, just 30 years removed from 700 years of British domination, had scarcely emerged from the 19th century. London, shrouded in fog and greasy coal soot, was the epicenter of an exhausted debtor nation, still clinging to an image of British exceptionalism as a young Queen Elizabeth took the throne and the empire circled the drain.

This engrossing memoir grounds the struggles of the Harveys in both Irish history and British snobbery as the family fought for a place in the world. It takes the reader on a journey from the serenity of life in a rural thatched cottage… through alcohol-fueled domestic violence in the Kilburn area bordering London’s Paddington and St. John’s Wood neighborhoods… to the anguish of emigration.