Mysteries of My Father

Excellent! I am ordering one for my sister, as we were both brought up in Jersey City, and book brings back many memories. John N.

This is an excellent book that mixes the talents of a good story teller with that of an historian. While the title has "An Irish-American Memoir" in it, it is certainly far more universal than that. It shows how people have to adapt to the world they live in not the one they wished they lived in, and how someones outward appearance can be quite different than the real inner person. This books works at several levels: the inner workings of marriages, parents and their children, making it in America as a newcomer or child of a newcomer, politics, and history. It's accuracy makes me realize how far we have come in 70 years but it also reminds me that for many of us our success and happiness traces back to some pretty tough, not highly educated, ward bosses like Teddy Fleming who cleared the way probably never fully realizing how much their day to day hard work would slowly change the world's major superpower to a more pluralistic and democractic country--even if some of their methods might shock our modern sensibilities. I recognized the authenticity of this boook immmediately. My grandfather was also, for a while, part of the Frank Hague machine but as county engineer. He eventually left to be county engineer for Bergen County because he refused to approve a sewer project that Hague wanted to give to a friend of Hague's who my grandfather felt was not qualified to do the job properly. With a degree in engineering it was much easier for my grandfather to pick and choose where he worked. Overall, a very enjoyable book at many levels.

Ernest Hemingway observed that there is nothing more difficult to write about than a man's life. In Mysteries of My Father, novelist and historian Thomas Fleming superbly does just that, as he examines his father Teddy Fleming's entire life in "downtown" Irish-Catholic Jersey City in the first half of twentieth-century America. Soul, verve, wit and heart emerge throughout. Teddy Fleming, with an eighth grade education and an indomitable will, overcomes the limited opportunities of his impoverished environment by first leading men in World War I combat. There he learns to trust himself while at the same time accepting the role of luck, or fate, in life. Once home, he rises as a ward organizer for legendary political boss Frank "I am the law" Hague, who eventually appoints Teddy as sheriff of Hudson County, New Jersey. The author weaves family history with the shared experience of early Irish-Americans who struggle for security against Protestant domination. This rich document speaks of fathers and sons, urban politics in the Tammany Hall era, the education of a historian, the imperative of finding a vocation, the power and influence of the Catholic Church, the pressures of poverty in the days of "Help Wanted---No Irish Need Apply" signs, and most directly, the dissolution of the marriage between the author's mother and father. The first half of the book, which predates the author's birth, introduces many extended family relatives. The time you spend getting to know everyone is a modest chore as the son deliberately assembles his father's portrait. As we move toward the author's first person perceptions in the second half of the account, though, the book begins to sprint. We watch as Teddy courts and marries refined schoolteacher Kitty Dolan, who detests her husband's immersion in lowbrow political chicanery and the Hague machine's reciprocal hold on Teddy's identity. Kitty's frustrated desire to transform her husband from a "thick mick" into someone more upright and discerning informs her estrangement from him. She hardens her resentment with efforts to alienate father from son, and the author labors to find the cause of his mother's sorrow. Teddy Fleming, the man, is much more than the simple hack Kitty sees him to be, but the author never judges either parent. He accepts the love they can give. Thomas Fleming is an elegant writer with a raconteur's facility for storytelling, tempered by a historian's devotion to accuracy. The author tells it like it is, to the extent he can, given his involvement in the events. The writer's willingness to confront his parents' disconnections all but verifies this commitment. He takes us to dark places but thankfully never loses a sense of humor along the way. Lively tales of Teddy's varying roles as a Hague functionary and family patriarch are aplenty. Amid the systemic graft, massive corruption, and revolving cast of rogues, decency lies in Teddy's delivery of jobs for the needy and v

Acclaimed historian Thomas Fleming has written popular histories of the Revolutionary War, several controversial re-examinations of such hallowed 20th century figures as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and best-selling historical novels. No one, however, could have guessed that his personal history, as told in "Mysteries of My Father," would provide the material for arguably his most gripping and powerful work. "New Jersey" and "corruption" go together like "hot fudge" and "sundae." The phrase recalls cliched images of fat, cigar-smoking pols raking in the big bucks and stealing from the poor. Fleming's family memoir takes an inside look at the ultimate political machine run by Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague, a boss who had presidents coming to him to curry his favor. But the picture is not quite what the tsk-tsk tone of the stereotypical history book would suggest. Fleming points out that the old-fashioned political machines often were all that certain poor, ethnic communities had to stand up for them. Like Homer Hickam's "Rocket Boys" (the basis for the movie "October Sky") and Brian McDonald's "My Father's Gun," this is the story of an important subculture going through the pressure cooker of 20th century changes, told by a narrator who is close enough to the action to take an inside look but enough of a nonparticipant to have the distance required for a proper perspective. Above all, these books tell, at their heart, the universal story of sons struggling to make their way out of their fathers' shadows - very big shadows, in fact, cast by larger-than-life figures. At the center of "Mysteries" is Thomas "Teddy" Fleming Sr., who fought bravely in the trenches of France during World War I though he had little use for the cause. Irish-Americans at the time had no interest in saving Britain from Germany, and they had legitimate trouble with the argument that Germany was any more expansionist than the country that had occupied the auld sod for centuries. However, the war would pave the way for two fateful factors of Teddy's life. First, he was away while most young people his age married, and second, his heroic status brought him to the attention of the Irish Democrat political machine that held power in Jersey City. It was only logical that the city's most eligible bachelor and the most popular single girl would be thrown together by their friends. Kitty Dolan was a pretty socialite who still was available only because her fiance had fallen fatally ill. What even her friends and family did not realize, however, was that Kitty saw her beau as a ticket out of what she thought of as low Irish life and society. Like the politicians, Kitty saw the potential in Teddy and how she could use it to her ends. Unlike them, however, Kitty had wholesale changes in mind for her husband, while the political machine gave him a job that perfectly suited his abilities, personality and skills - and immersed him in the life that Kitty so des