book review star of the sea

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

STAR OF THE SEA

by Joseph O’Connor ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Irish author O’Connor (Yeats Is Dead!, 2001; etc.) pulls out all the melodramatic stops for a thrilling tale without once...

A bumptious epic about a New World–bound ship Star of the Sea , full of raging immigrants, conflicted aristocrats, and a flint-eyed murderer.

It’s the tumultuous year of 1847 when O’Connor’s gallimaufry of characters board a “coffin ship” bound from Ireland to New York. Hundreds of famine refugees huddle in steerage, while just above them a handful of first-class passengers reside in splendor, though they’re rent with hidden intrigues—and all hear the thudding gait of the loner with the bad leg who wanders the ship at night. At center are two men in particular: the aristocrat David Merridith and the limping loner, Pius Mulvey. Merridith is a self-loathing scion of a British family that had long owned a large chunk of Ireland. When the estate’s fortunes crashed, at the height of the famine, most of the tenant families were put off the land—while corpses littered the countryside. Now on his way to New York with wife and children, Merridith has many secrets, most concerning their servant, Mary Duane. Pius is of a different stripe, though he hates himself just as much: having abandoned a pregnant girlfriend and his slightly mad brother in Ireland, Pius made himself into a high-living thief in London’s East End, one night even giving great inspiration to Charles Dickens, who was slumming for material. Later come to ruin, Pius has been embarked on a mission by some Hibernian thugs who won’t take no for an answer: kill the English scum David Merridith. Told mostly in flashbacks, and mostly through the highly arched voice of first-class passenger and journalist Grantley Dixon, this is the sort of gloriously overstuffed story that could be told in hushed breath over fifteen or so lengthy installments on late-night radio.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-15-100908-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by Joseph O’Connor

BOOK REVIEW

by Joseph O’Connor

edited by Joseph O’Connor

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2015

Kirkus Prize winner

National Book Award Finalist

A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

GENERAL FICTION

More by Hanya Yanagihara

by Hanya Yanagihara

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

More by Harper Lee

by Harper Lee

SEEN & HEARD

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Another country

Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor 436pp, Secker, £12.99

The Irish famine of the 1840s was the greatest social catastrophe of 19th-century Europe, yet inspired surprisingly little imaginative writing. There is a powerful novel by Liam O'Flaherty and a starkly moving drama by the contemporary playwright Tom Murphy. But in both Yeats and Joyce it is no more than a dim resonance. It is as though African-Americans were to maintain an embarrassed silence about the slave trade.

Shame and trauma may have played a part in this reticence. In recent years, however, there has been a political motive as well. Brooding on the one million dead and the one million who fled the famine is hardly much in vogue in an Ireland keen to play down its colonial past and flaunt its new-found modernity. With Ireland and the UK now cheek by jowl in the EU, it is not exactly politic to recall the bungled British relief effort, which sped a good many of the dead to their graves. Or to recall that quite a few eminent Britons, including the man in charge of the relief project, regarded the famine as God's way of punishing the feckless Micks for their congenital indolence. Moving in his usual mysterious way, the Almighty had chosen potato blight as a means of converting Connemara peasants into Boston politicians.

Commemorating the famine today, so it is whispered in some Irish circles, gives comfort to militant republicanism, which is one reason why the famine memorial industry tends to provoke the hard-boiled sons and daughters of the Celtic Tiger into a spot of well-bred sneering. The sheer kitschiness of some of it is a rather more honest reason. Talk in middle-class Dublin harps masochistically on the way some of the Irish themselves profited from the disaster. It also betrays an overcharitable eagerness to let the British government off the hook, even though there was easily enough food in Victorian Britain (of which Ireland was then part) to feed the Irish several times over. There are, it should be said, those who have spoken out against this shiftiness, including Joseph O'Connor's sister, Sinead.

Whitewashing one's past, however, is merely the flipside of wallowing in it. The neurotic, Freud remarked, is someone afflicted by reminiscences; but those who disavow their past are just as sick. Only when you can reclaim the past without either shame or nostalgia are you really free of it, which is one reason why Star of the Sea is to be acclaimed. Another reason is that O'Connor's supple, richly textured, faintly archaic prose, which draws on an Irish tradition of scrupulous verbal craftsmanship, puts to shame the colourless, drably functional language of so many of his English counterparts.

The Star of the Sea is a coffin ship, ploughing from Britain to America with a freight of evicted Irish scarecrows in steerage and a sprinkling of fascinatingly portrayed toffs in first class. The ship gets lighter by the day, as it sloughs off yet another pile of dead peasants. (They are, so the goodhearted English captain reflects, "as remote from our own race as the Hottentot, Watuti, Mohammedan or Chinese".) A roll call of the ship's main passengers reads like a gallery of Irish stereotypes. There is the brutal landlord, the wronged maidservant, the political balladeer, the aspiring young writer. Yet O'Connor's prose redeems these iconic figures from their banality, rather as if one were to turn Jack and the Beanstalk into a gripping realist novel.

In this self-consciously epic work, O'Connor mixes gothic and picaresque, history and biography, thriller and adventure story, to recreate all the sprawling diversity of high-Victorian fiction. As with much Irish writing, there is a telling contrast between the bleakness of the materials and the opulence of the treatment. While other writers content themselves with fine-drawn cameos of suburban adultery, O'Connor ranges from workhouse destitution and grotesque prison violence to storms at sea and delicately sketched love scenes. There is a Dickensian spaciousness here; indeed, the great man himself puts in a brief celebrity appearance.

Star of the Sea is a polyphonic novel, as different voices, social accents and national idioms weave their way in and out of the text. But if its tone is that of sober English realism, its structure is that of Irish literary experiment. The book is a montage of verbal forms: letters, quotation, first-person narrative, Hansard, captain's log, snatches of ballad, advertisements, news-paper clippings, historical documentation.

The ship is a microcosm of Irish society, the place where a number of different narratives converge, as they do in a piece of fiction. But the novel also traces each of these personal histories back to its roots, through love story and rogue's progress, tale of vengeance and big-house drama. There are several novellas tucked inside this well-upholstered text, along with cameos of the East End, snapshots of Victorian Belfast and vignettes of the Irish land-owning aristocracy.

The society that has only its contemporary experience to live by is poor indeed. With this stunningly accomplished novel, Irish fiction, for so long a prisoner of the present, breaks out into a richer, stranger country.

· Terry Eagleton's memoir, The Gatekeeper , is published by Penguin.

Most viewed

Star of the Sea

Joseph O'Connor | 4.25 | 7,089 ratings and reviews

Ranked #47 in Irish , Ranked #69 in Ireland

Similar Books

If you like Star of the Sea, check out these similar top-rated books:

Learn: What makes Shortform summaries the best in the world?

Kevein Books and Reviews

India's Number 1 Book Review Website

Search This Blog

Book review: star of the sea by joseph o’connor.

Review: Star of the Sea

How do you bring a novel on a famine ship to the stage with delicate balance and theatrical invention.

Morgan Cooke and Ionia Ní Chróinín

Star of the Sea

An Taibhdhearc, Galway

Joseph O’Connor’s 2004 novel doesn’t exactly beg for the stage. It’s a beautiful, layered and dense read, set against the lofty sails of a famine ship. But Moonfish is an ambitious company that has a knack for deconstructing and rebuilding deftly.

In Star of the Sea , a landlord, a lover, brothers and others are layers stacked in a very delicately balanced production. Shadows are cast over famine-era Ireland, and it's in the shadows that this production comes alive, thanks to inventive subtitling, projections, musical interludes and soundtracking. The cast take turns in standing back generously while the interlocking stories play out, with perfectly pitched sound pouring over a sepia-tinged landscape.

There are inevitable structural issues with a story that flips from Connemara to a crowded ship deck, from London opium dens to pre-famine shebeens, but it manages to rein everything in – just.

This is a series of obligations: to family, to landed gentry, to journey, to duty, although a central focus on the landlord David Merridith, who is teetering on demise, is a little unfortunate given his unsympathetic disposition, even if it is well-played.

Morgan Cooke's sensitive portrayal of Nicholas Mulvey, the less ambitious brother of Pius, reaches a heartbreaking pinnacle with a brutal beating, along with the retelling of a walk among the starving. It's during that monologue that the desperation of the era becomes visceral, as bags of salt or grain, or whatever else they didn't have, empty behind him.

Where keening tunes could be hackneyed they are affecting. The heart of the matter – the cruel and brutal starvation and the micro-soap-operas that unfold within that context – isn’t exactly ripped open, and the nonlinear framework requires attention, but this is gorgeously assembled theatre, with lighting and sound design hitting every mark.

Moonfish deserves plaudits for producing a bilingual play that is accessible to non-Irish-speakers. The approach is neither pedagogical nor worthy, but deft and completely natural. While An Taibhdhearc encases this production beautifully, one wonders how it could soar on a larger stage. Until July 19

Una Mullally

Una Mullally, a contributor to The Irish Times, writes a weekly opinion column

IN THIS SECTION

Emma donoghue: ‘with birth, it’s a real spin of the roulette wheel. women’s lives have always been determined by this crapshoot’, ricky tomlinson: ‘people love being entertained, having a laugh ... i just think doing it in ireland might be a little notch above’, sinéad o’connor: pantsless queer horrorcore act evokes seance and celebration in new york tribute to late singer, mother and child review: a family reunion staged as a psychological drama, israeli choreographer expresses sadness over ballet ireland axing, tributes left at queens bar where irish woman sarah mcnally died in alleged knife attack, ‘my wife is a fantastic woman, my soulmate and an incredible mother, but our marriage is sexless’, ‘you’re famous, what are you doing here’: the asylum seeker who has gone from somali tv to a bunk bed in citywest, pathway to top of croagh patrick almost complete after more than three years of work, sharp rise in sexual images generated by primary school pupils, foley warns, latest stories, the husband and wife medics working to spread reliable parenting truths to counter the online noise, io capitano: chronicling the perilous migrant trek from senegal to europe with homeric flair, gas networks ireland to connect bord na móna’s edenderry power plant to its supply network, ‘we’re missing our country, our place, our ramadan in sudan’, tax treatment of ukrainians working remotely in ireland for companies at home set to change.

• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Information
• Cookie Settings
• Community Standards

• Literature & Fiction
• World Literature

Buy new: $21.95 $21.95 + $6.25 Shipping & Import Fees Deposit. Ships from: Amazon Sold by: CATINGTON LLC

• Amazon international products are subject to separate terms and conditions and are sold from abroad by foreign sellers. Amazon’s products may differ from versions available in Canada, including configuration, age rating, product language, labelling and instructions.
• The manufacturer’s warranty may not be valid in Canada.

Buy used: $15.52

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video, download Flash Player

Follow the author

Star Of The Sea Paperback – March 8 2004

Purchase options and add-ons.

• ISBN-10 0156029669
• ISBN-13 978-0156029667
• Edition Reprint
• Publisher Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date March 8 2004
• Language English
• Dimensions 13.49 x 2.72 x 20.32 cm
• Print length 432 pages
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Popular titles by this author

Product description

PRAISE FOR JOSEPH O'CONNOR "Joseph O'Connor has a great eye for the absurd in common things, a great ear for the comic in ordinary speech. His writing is terrific."--Roddy Doyle PRAISE FOR THE SALESMAN "Powerful . . . freewheeling and supple, switching between the comic, the candid, and the profane."-- The New York Times Book Review "Gripping . . . O'Connor's dialogue is by turns bristling and bleak, tender and funny, and his characters are free of stereotypes."-- The Wall Street Journal —

From the Back Cover

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Paperbacks; Reprint edition (March 8 2004)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0156029669
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0156029667
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 367 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.49 x 2.72 x 20.32 cm
• #1,062 in Historical British & Irish Literature
• #2,013 in Ancient World Historical Romance (Books)
• #3,585 in Sea Stories

About the author

Joseph o'connor.

Joseph O'Connor was born in Dublin. His latest novel My Father's House, published in January 2023, became an instant bestseller, described by the Sunday Times as 'a spectacular, thrilling novel' and by the Observer as 'a literary thriller of the highest order'. Previous books include the novels Cowboys and Indians, Desperadoes, The Salesman, Inishowen, Ghost Light, Redemption Falls, The Thrill of it All and Shadowplay (Irish Novel of the Year Award 2019, Costa Novel Award shortlist). He has also written stage plays, screenplays, short stories, and radio diaries. His novel Star of the Sea became an international bestseller, winning an American Library Association Award, France's Prix Millepages, Italy's Premio Acerbi, and the Prix Zepter for European Novel of the Year. Among his nonfiction books is Sweet Liberty: Travels in Irish America. He has been a Cullman Research Fellow at the New York Public Library and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

Customer reviews

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from Canada

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon and Our Planet
• Investor Relations
• Press Releases
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Sell on Amazon Handmade
• Advertise Your Products
• Independently Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• Amazon.ca Rewards Mastercard
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon Cash
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns Are Easy
• Manage your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Customer Service
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Interest-Based Ads
• Amazon.com.ca ULC | 40 King Street W 47th Floor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5H 3Y2 |1-877-586-3230

The Book Report Network

• Bookreporter
• ReadingGroupGuides
• AuthorsOnTheWeb

Sign up for our newsletters!

Find a Guide

For book groups, what's your book group reading this month, favorite monthly lists & picks, most requested guides of 2023, when no discussion guide available, starting a reading group, running a book group, choosing what to read, tips for book clubs, books about reading groups, coming soon, new in paperback, write to us, frequently asked questions.

• Request a Guide

Advertise with Us

Add your guide, you are here:, star of the sea.

The Leave-Taking

The FIRST of our TWENTY-SIX days at Sea: 

in which Our Protector records some essential Particulars,

and the Circumstances attending our setting-out.

VIII NOV. MDCCCXLVII

MONDAY THE EIGHTH DAY OF NOVEMBER, 

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-SEVEN 

TWENTY-FIVE DAYS AT SEA REMAINING.

The following is the only register of Josias Tuke Lockwood, Master of Vessel, signed and written in his own hand; and I attest it on my solemn honour a compleat and true account of the voyage, and neither has any matter pertinent been omitted.

LONG: 10°16.7'W. LAT: 51°35.5'N. ACTUAL GREENWICH STANDARD TIME: 8.17 P.M. WIND DIR. & SPEED: S.S.W. Force 4. BUFFETING SEAS: rough. HEADING: W.N.W. 282.7°. PRECIPITATION. & REMARKS: Mild mist all the day but very cold and clear night. Upper riggings encrusted with ice. Dursey Island to starboard. Tearagh Isld visible at 52°4.5'N, 10°39.7'W, most westerly point of Ireland and therefore of the United Kingdom. (Property of the Earl of Cork.)

NAME OF VESSEL: The Star of the Sea (formerly the Golden Lady).

BUILDER: John Wood, Port Glasgow (prop. engines by M. Brunel).

OWNER: Silver Star Shipping Line & Co.

PREVIOUS VOYAGE: Dublin Port (South Docks) - Liverpool - Dublin Kingstown.

PORT OF EMBARKATION: Queenstown (or The Cove). 51°51'N; 008°18'W.

PORT OF DESTINATION: New York. 40°.42'N; 74°.02'W.

DISTANCE: 2,768 nautical miles direct: to be factorised for tacking into westerlies.

FIRST MATE: Thos. Leeson.

ROYAL MAIL AGENT: George Wellesley Esq. (accompnd. by a servant, Briggs).

WEIGHT OF VESSEL: 1,154 gross tons.

LENGTH OF VESSEL: 207 ft ¥ beam 34 ft.

GENERAL: clipper bows, one funnel, three square-rig masts (rigged for sail), oaken hull (copperfastened), three decks, a poop and topgallant forecastle, side-paddle wheel propulsion, full speed 9 knots. All seaworthy though substantial repairs required; also damage to interior fittings & cetera. Bad leaking through overhead and bulkheads of steerage. Hull to be audited in dry dock at New York and caulked if required.

CARGO: 5,000 lbs of mercury for Alabama Mining Co. The Royal Mail (forty bags). Sunderland coal for fuel. (Poor quality the supply, dirty and slaggy.) Luggage of passengers. Spare slop in stores. One grand piano for John J. Astor Esq. at New York.

PROVISIONS: sufficient of freshwater, ale, brandy, claret, rum, pork, cocks, mutton, biscuit, preserved milk & cetera. Also oatmeal, cutlings, molasses, potatoes, salt or hung beef, pork, bacon and hams, salted veal, fowl in pickle, coffee, tea, cyder, spices, pepper, ginger, flour, eggs, good port wine and porter-beer, pickled colewort, split peas for soup; and lastly, vinegar, butter, and potted herrings. Live beasts (caged) to be butchered on board: pigs, chickens, lambs and geese.

One passenger, a certain Meadowes, is lodged in the lock-up for drunkenness and fighting. (A hopeless out-and-outer: he shall have to be watched.) Suspected case of Typhus Fever moved to the hold for isolation.

Be it recorded that this day three passengers of the steerage class died, the cause in each case being the infirmity consequent on prolonged starvation. Margaret Farrell, fifty-two yrs, a married woman of Rathfylane, Enniscorthy, County Wexford; Joseph English, seventeen yrs (formerly, it is said, apprenticed to a wheelwright) of no fixed place but born near Cootehill, County Cavan; and James Michael Nolan of Skibbereen, County Cork, aged one month and two days (bastard child).

Their mortal remains were committed to the sea. May Almighty God have mercy upon their souls: 'For here have we no continuing city, but we seek the one to come.'

We have thirty-seven crew, 4021/2 ordinary steerage passengers (a child being reckoned in the usual way as one half of one adult passenger) and fifteen in the First-Class quarters or superior staterooms. Among the latter: Earl David Merridith of Kingscourt and his wife the Countess, their children and an Irish maidservant. Mr G.G. Dixon of the New York Tribune: a noted columnist and man of letters. Surgeon Wm. Mangan, M.D. of the Theatre of Anatomy, Peter Street, Dublin, accompanied by his sister, Mrs Derrington, relict; His Imperial Highness, the potentate Maharajah Ranjitsinji, a princely personage of India; Reverend Henry Deedes, D.D., a Methodist Minister from Lyme Regis in England (upgraded); and various others.

As we sailed this day came heavy news of the wreck of the Exmouth out of Liverpool on the 4th ult. with the loss of all 2391/2 emigrants on board and all but three of the crew. May Almighty God have mercy upon their souls: and may He bestow greater clemency upon our own voyage; or at least observe it with benign indifference.

The SECOND evening of the Voyage: in which a certain important Passenger is introduced to the Reader.

12°49'W; 51°11'N. 8.15 P.M.

The Right Honourable Thomas David Nelson Merridith, the noble Lord Kingscourt, the Viscount of Roundstone, the ninth Earl of Cashel, Kilkerrin and Carna, entered the Dining Saloon to an explosion of smashing glass.

A steward, a Negro, had stumbled near the doorway, bucked by a sudden roll of the vessel, letting slip an overloaded salver of charged champagne flutes. Someone was performing an ironic slow-handclap at the fallen man's expense. An inebriated mocking cheer came from the farthest corner: 'Huazzah! Bravo! Well done, that fellow!' Another voice called: 'They'll have to put up the fares!'

The steward was on his knees now, trying to clear the debris. Blood was rivuleting down his slender left wrist, staining the cuff of his brocaded jacket. In his anxiety to collect the shards of shattered crystal he had sliced open his thumb from ball to tip.

'Mind your hand,' Lord Kingscourt said. 'Here.' He offered the steward a clean linen handkerchief. The man looked up with an expression of dread. His mouth began to work but no sound came. The Chief Steward had bustled over and was barking at his subordinate in a language Merridith did not understand. Was it German, perhaps? Portuguese? Saliva flew from his mouth as he hissed and cursed the man, who was now cowering on the carpet like a beaten child, his uniform besmirched with blood and champagne, a grotesque parody of commodore's whites.

'David?' called Merridith's wife. He turned to look. She had half risen from her banquette at the Captain's table and was gaily beckoning him over with a bread-knife, her knotted eyebrows and pinched lips set in a burlesque of impatience. The people around her were laughing madly, all except the Maharajah, who never laughed. When Merridith glanced back towards the steward again, he was being chivvied from the saloon by his furious superior, the latter still bawling in the guttural language, the transgressor cradling his hand to his breast like a wounded bird.

Lord Kingscourt's palate tasted acridly of salt. His head hurt and his vision was cloudy. For several weeks he had been suffering some kind of urinary infection and since boarding the ship at Kingstown, it had worsened significantly. This morning it had pained him to pass water; a scalding burn that had made him cry out. He wished he'd seen a doctor before embarking on the voyage. Nothing for it now but to wait for New York. Couldn't be frank with that drunken idiot Mangan. Maybe four weeks. Hope and pray.

Surgeon Mangan, a morose old bore by day, was already pink in the face from drinking, his greasy hair gleaming like a polished strap. His sister, who looked like a caricature of a cardinal, was systematically breaking the petals off a pale yellow rose. For a moment Lord Kingscourt wondered if she was going to eat them; but instead she dropped them one by one into her tumbler of water. Watching them with a sullen undergraduate expression sat the Louisiana columnist, Grantley Dixon, in a dinner jacket he had clearly borrowed from someone larger and which gave his shoulders a boxy look. Merridith disliked him and always had, since being forced to endure his socialistic prattle at one of Laura's infernal literary evenings in London. The novelists and poets were tolerable in their way, but the aspiring novelists and poets were simply insufferable. A clown, Grantley Dixon, a perfervid parrot, with his militant slogans and second-hand attitudes: like all coffee-house radicals a screaming snob at heart. As for his imperious guff about the novel he was writing, Merridith knew a dilettante when he saw one, and he was looking at one now. When he'd heard Grantley Dixon was going to be on the same ship, he had almost wanted to postpone the journey. But Laura had told him he was being ridiculous. He could always count on Laura to tell him that.

What a collection to have to abide over dinner. A favourite expression of his father's came into Merridith's mind. Too much for the white man to be asked to bear.

'Are you quite all right, dear?' Laura asked. She enjoyed the role of the concerned wife, particularly when she had an audience to appreciate her concern. He didn't mind. It made her happy. Sometimes it even made him happy too.

'You look as if you're in pain. Or discomfort of some kind.'

'I'm fine,' he said, easing into his seat. 'Just famished.'

'Amen to that,' said Surgeon Mangan.

'Excuse my lateness,' Lord Kingscourt said. 'There are two little chaps I know who insist on being told bedtime stories.'

The Mail Agent, a father, gave a strange, baleful smile. Merridith's wife rolled her eyes like a doll.

'Our girl Mary is ill again,' she said.

Mary Duane was their nanny, a native from Carna in County Galway. David Merridith had known her all his life.

'I don't know what's come over that girl,' Lady Kingscourt continued. 'She's barely left her cabin since the moment we boarded. When usually she's hale as a Connemara pony. And quite as bloody-minded as one too.' She held up her fork and gazed at it closely, for some reason gently pricking her fingertips with the ends of the tines.

'Perhaps she is homesick,' Lord Kingscourt said.

His wife laughed briefly. 'I hardly think so.'

'I notice some of the sailorboys giving her the glad eye,' said the Surgeon affably. 'Pretty little thing if she didn't wear so much black.'

'She was bereaved of her husband not too long ago,' said Merridith. 'So she probably shan't notice the sailorboys I should think.'

'Oh dear, oh dear. Hard thing at her age.'

'Quite.'

Wine was poured. Bread was offered. A steward brought a tureen and began to serve the vichyssoise.

Lord Kingscourt was finding it difficult to concentrate. A worm of pain corkscrewed slowly through his groin: a stone-blind maggot of piercing venom. He could feel his shirt sticking to his shoulders and abdomen. The Dining Saloon had an ashy, stagnant atmosphere, as though pumped dry of air and filled up with pulverised lead. Against the cloying odour of meat and over-bloomed lilies another more evil stench was trying to gain. What in the name of Christ was that filthy smell?

The Surgeon had clearly been in the middle of one of his interminable stories when Merridith had arrived. He resumed telling it now, chuckling expansively, enfeebled by duckish clucks of self-amusement as he gaped around at the dutifully simpering company. Something about a pig who could talk. Or dance? Or stand on its hind legs and sing Tom Moore. It was an Irish peasant story anyway: all of the Surgeon's were. Gintilmin. Sorr. Jayzus be savin' Yer Worship. He tugged his invisible forelock and puffed out his cheeks, so juicily proud of his facility for imitation. It was something Merridith found hard to stomach, the way the prosperous Irish were never done lampooning their rural countrymen: a sign, they often claimed, of their own maturity on matters national, but in truth just another form of cringing obsequiousness.

'Will you tell me now,' the Surgeon chortled, his bright eyes streaming with excess of mirth, 'where else could that happen but darlin' auld Oirland?'

He spoke the last three words as though in inverted commas.

'Wonderful people,' agreed the heavily perspiring Mail Agent. 'A marvellous logic all their own.'

The Maharajah said nothing for a few long moments, grim-faced and bored in his stiff robes. Then he muttered a few gloomy syllables and snapped his fingers to his personal butler who was standing like a Guardian Angel a few feet behind him. The butler brought over a small silver box, which the Maharajah reverently opened. Out of it he took a pair of spectacles. He looked at them for a moment, as though surprised to have found them there. Cleaned them with a napkin and put them on.

'You'll remain at New York for some time, Lord Kingscourt?'

It took a moment for Merridith to realise whom the Captain was addressing.

'Indeed,' he said. 'I mean to go into business, Lockwood.'

Inevitably Dixon gave him a look. 'Since when did the gentry stoop to working for a living?'

'There's a famine in progress in Ireland, Dixon. I assume you stumbled across it on your visit there, did you?'

The Captain gave an apprehensive laugh. 'I'm sure our American friend meant no offence, Lord Kingscourt. He only thought - '

'I'm quite aware of what he thought. How can an Earl be fallen low as a tradesman? In a way my dear wife often thinks the same thing.' He looked across the table at her. 'Don't you, Laura?'

Lady Kingscourt said nothing. Her husband went back to his soup. He wanted to eat it before it coagulated.

'Yes. So you see my predicament, Dixon. Not a man on my estate has paid rent for four years. My father's death leaves me with half of all the bogland in southern Connemara, a great deal of stones and bad turf, a greater deal of overdue accounts and unpaid wages. Not to mention the considerable duties owing to the government.' He broke a piece of bread and took a sip of wine. 'Dying is rather expensive,' he smiled darkly at the Captain. 'Unlike this claret. Which is muck.'

Lockwood glanced uneasily around the table. He wasn't accustomed to dealing with the aristocracy.

Excerpted from  Star of the Sea  © Copyright 2002 by Joseph O'Connor. Reprinted with permission by Harvest Books, an imprint of Harcourt Trade Publishers. All rights reserved.

Star of the Sea by by Joseph O'Connor

• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• ISBN-10: 0156029669
• ISBN-13: 9780156029667
• About the Book
• Discussion Questions
• Reading Guide (PDF)
• Critical Praise

• How to Add a Guide
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Newsletters

Copyright © 2024 The Book Report, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Advertisement

Supported by

A Warhol Superstar, but Never a Star

Cynthia Carr’s compassionate biography chronicles the brief, poignant life of the transgender actress Candy Darling, whose “very existence was radical.”

• Share full article

By Alexandra Jacobs

CANDY DARLING: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, by Cynthia Carr

Never mind soup-can paintings and portraits of the famous — what Andy Warhol keeps on giving is books . He’s like Mother Ginger in “The Nutcracker” : Smaller people keep running out from under his capacious skirts to bow or curtsy.

The latest is Candy Darling, the transgender actress who succumbed to cancer at 29 in 1974 , after being immortalized in a famous photograph by Peter Hujar and in the Lou Reed song “ Walk on the Wild Side .” She had lived fast — indeed frequently on speed — died young, and left a mutable corpse, with considerable dissent among family and friends about whether she should be buried and eulogized as a man or a woman.

The first full-length biography of her, by Cynthia Carr, a longtime staff writer for The Village Voice — quite the Mother Ginger itself, of late — is compassionate and meticulous, reconstructing its brittle, gleaming subject as one might a broken Meissen figurine.

Born the day after Thanksgiving in 1944, Candy Darling was christened James Lawrence Slattery in Queens, soon moving to the ticky-tacky conformist hamlets of North Merrick and then Massapequa Park, Long Island, which she’d later euphemize as her “country home” but which was then an apparent cesspool of toxic masculinity.

Her father, John, was a cashier for the New York Racing Association who gambled, drank and was violent: the ultimate Daddy Dearest for a child with effeminate tendencies. Her mother, Terry, a receptionist and bank teller, was more supportive and loving — but still, hamstrung by shame. Candy’s half brother, Warren, babysat for her as a child but did not accept her as a woman.

As a child, “Jimmy,” as Candy was known then, was shunned socially and bullied terribly, once ushered onto a box and into a noose by two teenagers in a neighbor’s backyard. Understandably, she avoided regular school as much as possible; her education was in magazines, cosmetology and, of course, movies — she was a Kim Novak superfan, later emulating her.

She worked briefly at a beauty parlor, whose sympathetic owner she took on adventures like horseback riding. “We can always imagine we’re out in the wide-open spaces,” she said dreamily. “And if you imagine it strong enough, you will be.”

Like Ada Calhoun, the daughter of the art critic Peter Schjeldahl who took over his unfinished biography of the poet Frank O’Hara with sparkling results , Carr gets a boost from someone else’s abandoned legwork. Darling’s close friend Jeremiah Newton interviewed many of her intimates before they died — he features prominently in a 2011 documentary, “ Beautiful Darling ” — and shared copious photos, letters and the diaries that Darling began keeping at 13 (some previously published ). One is titled “The Worst Years of My Life.”

Carr spares us the ponderous establishing shots that weigh down many books of this genre. Though “Worst Years” covers the early ’60s, for example, the only mention of John F. Kennedy in Carr’s book comes via a fan taking a picture of Marilyn Monroe the night she sang for his birthday. Candy Darling was apolitical, the author writes — she had a wistful incandescence more than a “fire in the belly” (as Carr titled a previous book about the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz) — “yet her very existence was radical.”

She and the future Holly Woodlawn, another Warhol favorite, both toiled as file clerks and got out of the draft, Holly by showing up in hot pants and rouge; Candy by bursting into tears.

Stardom was Darling’s absolute raison d’être. You might argue that she was not only transgender but trans-era, longing to be a product and protectorate of the studio system. Alas, Warhol was no Louis B. Mayer, his films mostly art-house experiments — Carr is heroic at summarizing them — and when Darling finally gets to Los Angeles, for the premiere of his movie “ Women in Revolt ” (titled “Sex” at the time), the closest thing she gets to a break is broken promises from a drunk Ed McMahon needing roadside assistance. She does appear for about 15 seconds, uncredited, in the nightclub scene of “Klute, ” and for a while dated Roger Vadim.

Starring in Tennessee Williams’s late-career work “Small Craft Warnings” off Broadway was another high point — though even then neither the male nor the female actors wanted her in their dressing room, and she was consigned to a broom closet. She appeared in a Warhol-staged fashion show for Halston, but was only allowed to wear a maid’s costume.

Darling kept her chin up despite these humiliations, but again and again the rest of her body betrayed her. (Poverty and drugs didn’t help.) By 18, she’d lost almost a third of her teeth. She agonized about what she called “my flaw” — the pesky penis — but vacillated on what the publicist R. Couri Hay, one of those who eulogized her using the masculine pronoun, termed “the final cut.”

The massive quantities of unregulated female hormones she took, doctors and others thought, probably killed her — and yet dying young was in keeping with her fantasy of kinship to platinum-haired idols like Jean Harlow. Sardonic to the end, she joked that the presumed tumor hardening her belly was some kind of immaculate conception.

In a society ill equipped to accept her, Candy Darling’s short life was one of couch-surfing and cadging, which can make for some weird and grotty pages — oh, there’s a desiccated chicken under the bed. Many of those who remember her are unreliable narrators. But, as Carr notes: “All of them so delightful!” Bob Colacello, the O.G. Warhol chronicler, wrote that news of her fatal illness led to the only time he’d seen the artist cry.

There wasn’t really vocabulary to describe the territory Darling was exploring back then — maybe there’s too much vocabulary now, but that’s a different conversation — and her biographer extends a sure hand across the breach. To push her from the Warhol wings to center stage, at a moment when transgender rights are in roiling flux, just makes sense.

And you have to cheer when Tennessee Williams is asked by some rude person whether his star is a transsexual or a transvestite, and he roars back: “What a question to ask a lady!”

CANDY DARLING : Dreamer, Icon, Superstar | By Cynthia Carr | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 432 pp. | $30

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

James McBride’s novel sold a million copies, and he isn’t sure how he feels about that, as he considers the critical and commercial success  of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.”

How did gender become a scary word? Judith Butler, the theorist who got us talking about the subject , has answers.

You never know what’s going to go wrong in these graphic novels, where Circus tigers, giant spiders, shifting borders and motherhood all threaten to end life as we know it .

When the author Tommy Orange received an impassioned email from a teacher in the Bronx, he dropped everything to visit the students  who inspired it.

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

• Literature & Fiction
• Genre Fiction

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Star of the Sea Paperback – Bargain Price, March 8, 2004

• Print length 432 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Mariner Books
• Publication date March 8, 2004
• Grade level 9 - 12
• Reading age 14 years and up
• Dimensions 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• See all details

Similar items that may ship from close to you

Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B001O9CGUI
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (March 8, 2004)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 9 - 12
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches

About the author

Joseph o'connor.

Joseph O'Connor was born in Dublin. His latest novel My Father's House, published in January 2023, became an instant bestseller, described by the Sunday Times as 'a spectacular, thrilling novel' and by the Observer as 'a literary thriller of the highest order'. Previous books include the novels Cowboys and Indians, Desperadoes, The Salesman, Inishowen, Ghost Light, Redemption Falls, The Thrill of it All and Shadowplay (Irish Novel of the Year Award 2019, Costa Novel Award shortlist). He has also written stage plays, screenplays, short stories, and radio diaries. His novel Star of the Sea became an international bestseller, winning an American Library Association Award, France's Prix Millepages, Italy's Premio Acerbi, and the Prix Zepter for European Novel of the Year. Among his nonfiction books is Sweet Liberty: Travels in Irish America. He has been a Cullman Research Fellow at the New York Public Library and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Reviews with images

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Start Selling with Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

• Bookreporter
• ReadingGroupGuides
• AuthorsOnTheWeb

The Book Report Network

Sign up for our newsletters!

Regular Features

Author spotlights, "bookreporter talks to" videos & podcasts, "bookaccino live: a lively talk about books", favorite monthly lists & picks, seasonal features, book festivals, sports features, bookshelves.

• Coming Soon

Newsletters

• Weekly Update
• On Sale This Week
• Spring Preview
• Winter Reading
• Holiday Cheer
• Fall Preview
• Summer Reading

Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, star of the sea.

The Leave-Taking

The FIRST of our TWENTY-SIX days at Sea: 

in which Our Protector records some essential Particulars,

and the Circumstances attending our setting-out.

VIII NOV. MDCCCXLVII

MONDAY THE EIGHTH DAY OF NOVEMBER, 

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-SEVEN 

TWENTY-FIVE DAYS AT SEA REMAINING.

The following is the only register of Josias Tuke Lockwood, Master of Vessel, signed and written in his own hand; and I attest it on my solemn honour a compleat and true account of the voyage, and neither has any matter pertinent been omitted.

LONG: 10°16.7'W. LAT: 51°35.5'N. ACTUAL GREENWICH STANDARD TIME: 8.17 P.M. WIND DIR. & SPEED: S.S.W. Force 4. BUFFETING SEAS: rough. HEADING: W.N.W. 282.7°. PRECIPITATION. & REMARKS: Mild mist all the day but very cold and clear night. Upper riggings encrusted with ice. Dursey Island to starboard. Tearagh Isld visible at 52°4.5'N, 10°39.7'W, most westerly point of Ireland and therefore of the United Kingdom. (Property of the Earl of Cork.)

NAME OF VESSEL: The Star of the Sea (formerly the Golden Lady).

BUILDER: John Wood, Port Glasgow (prop. engines by M. Brunel).

OWNER: Silver Star Shipping Line & Co.

PREVIOUS VOYAGE: Dublin Port (South Docks) - Liverpool - Dublin Kingstown.

PORT OF EMBARKATION: Queenstown (or The Cove). 51°51'N; 008°18'W.

PORT OF DESTINATION: New York. 40°.42'N; 74°.02'W.

DISTANCE: 2,768 nautical miles direct: to be factorised for tacking into westerlies.

FIRST MATE: Thos. Leeson.

ROYAL MAIL AGENT: George Wellesley Esq. (accompnd. by a servant, Briggs).

WEIGHT OF VESSEL: 1,154 gross tons.

LENGTH OF VESSEL: 207 ft ¥ beam 34 ft.

GENERAL: clipper bows, one funnel, three square-rig masts (rigged for sail), oaken hull (copperfastened), three decks, a poop and topgallant forecastle, side-paddle wheel propulsion, full speed 9 knots. All seaworthy though substantial repairs required; also damage to interior fittings & cetera. Bad leaking through overhead and bulkheads of steerage. Hull to be audited in dry dock at New York and caulked if required.

CARGO: 5,000 lbs of mercury for Alabama Mining Co. The Royal Mail (forty bags). Sunderland coal for fuel. (Poor quality the supply, dirty and slaggy.) Luggage of passengers. Spare slop in stores. One grand piano for John J. Astor Esq. at New York.

PROVISIONS: sufficient of freshwater, ale, brandy, claret, rum, pork, cocks, mutton, biscuit, preserved milk & cetera. Also oatmeal, cutlings, molasses, potatoes, salt or hung beef, pork, bacon and hams, salted veal, fowl in pickle, coffee, tea, cyder, spices, pepper, ginger, flour, eggs, good port wine and porter-beer, pickled colewort, split peas for soup; and lastly, vinegar, butter, and potted herrings. Live beasts (caged) to be butchered on board: pigs, chickens, lambs and geese.

One passenger, a certain Meadowes, is lodged in the lock-up for drunkenness and fighting. (A hopeless out-and-outer: he shall have to be watched.) Suspected case of Typhus Fever moved to the hold for isolation.

Be it recorded that this day three passengers of the steerage class died, the cause in each case being the infirmity consequent on prolonged starvation. Margaret Farrell, fifty-two yrs, a married woman of Rathfylane, Enniscorthy, County Wexford; Joseph English, seventeen yrs (formerly, it is said, apprenticed to a wheelwright) of no fixed place but born near Cootehill, County Cavan; and James Michael Nolan of Skibbereen, County Cork, aged one month and two days (bastard child).

Their mortal remains were committed to the sea. May Almighty God have mercy upon their souls: 'For here have we no continuing city, but we seek the one to come.'

We have thirty-seven crew, 4021/2 ordinary steerage passengers (a child being reckoned in the usual way as one half of one adult passenger) and fifteen in the First-Class quarters or superior staterooms. Among the latter: Earl David Merridith of Kingscourt and his wife the Countess, their children and an Irish maidservant. Mr G.G. Dixon of the New York Tribune: a noted columnist and man of letters. Surgeon Wm. Mangan, M.D. of the Theatre of Anatomy, Peter Street, Dublin, accompanied by his sister, Mrs Derrington, relict; His Imperial Highness, the potentate Maharajah Ranjitsinji, a princely personage of India; Reverend Henry Deedes, D.D., a Methodist Minister from Lyme Regis in England (upgraded); and various others.

As we sailed this day came heavy news of the wreck of the Exmouth out of Liverpool on the 4th ult. with the loss of all 2391/2 emigrants on board and all but three of the crew. May Almighty God have mercy upon their souls: and may He bestow greater clemency upon our own voyage; or at least observe it with benign indifference.

The SECOND evening of the Voyage: in which a certain important Passenger is introduced to the Reader.

12°49'W; 51°11'N. 8.15 P.M.

The Right Honourable Thomas David Nelson Merridith, the noble Lord Kingscourt, the Viscount of Roundstone, the ninth Earl of Cashel, Kilkerrin and Carna, entered the Dining Saloon to an explosion of smashing glass.

A steward, a Negro, had stumbled near the doorway, bucked by a sudden roll of the vessel, letting slip an overloaded salver of charged champagne flutes. Someone was performing an ironic slow-handclap at the fallen man's expense. An inebriated mocking cheer came from the farthest corner: 'Huazzah! Bravo! Well done, that fellow!' Another voice called: 'They'll have to put up the fares!'

The steward was on his knees now, trying to clear the debris. Blood was rivuleting down his slender left wrist, staining the cuff of his brocaded jacket. In his anxiety to collect the shards of shattered crystal he had sliced open his thumb from ball to tip.

'Mind your hand,' Lord Kingscourt said. 'Here.' He offered the steward a clean linen handkerchief. The man looked up with an expression of dread. His mouth began to work but no sound came. The Chief Steward had bustled over and was barking at his subordinate in a language Merridith did not understand. Was it German, perhaps? Portuguese? Saliva flew from his mouth as he hissed and cursed the man, who was now cowering on the carpet like a beaten child, his uniform besmirched with blood and champagne, a grotesque parody of commodore's whites.

'David?' called Merridith's wife. He turned to look. She had half risen from her banquette at the Captain's table and was gaily beckoning him over with a bread-knife, her knotted eyebrows and pinched lips set in a burlesque of impatience. The people around her were laughing madly, all except the Maharajah, who never laughed. When Merridith glanced back towards the steward again, he was being chivvied from the saloon by his furious superior, the latter still bawling in the guttural language, the transgressor cradling his hand to his breast like a wounded bird.

Lord Kingscourt's palate tasted acridly of salt. His head hurt and his vision was cloudy. For several weeks he had been suffering some kind of urinary infection and since boarding the ship at Kingstown, it had worsened significantly. This morning it had pained him to pass water; a scalding burn that had made him cry out. He wished he'd seen a doctor before embarking on the voyage. Nothing for it now but to wait for New York. Couldn't be frank with that drunken idiot Mangan. Maybe four weeks. Hope and pray.

Surgeon Mangan, a morose old bore by day, was already pink in the face from drinking, his greasy hair gleaming like a polished strap. His sister, who looked like a caricature of a cardinal, was systematically breaking the petals off a pale yellow rose. For a moment Lord Kingscourt wondered if she was going to eat them; but instead she dropped them one by one into her tumbler of water. Watching them with a sullen undergraduate expression sat the Louisiana columnist, Grantley Dixon, in a dinner jacket he had clearly borrowed from someone larger and which gave his shoulders a boxy look. Merridith disliked him and always had, since being forced to endure his socialistic prattle at one of Laura's infernal literary evenings in London. The novelists and poets were tolerable in their way, but the aspiring novelists and poets were simply insufferable. A clown, Grantley Dixon, a perfervid parrot, with his militant slogans and second-hand attitudes: like all coffee-house radicals a screaming snob at heart. As for his imperious guff about the novel he was writing, Merridith knew a dilettante when he saw one, and he was looking at one now. When he'd heard Grantley Dixon was going to be on the same ship, he had almost wanted to postpone the journey. But Laura had told him he was being ridiculous. He could always count on Laura to tell him that.

What a collection to have to abide over dinner. A favourite expression of his father's came into Merridith's mind. Too much for the white man to be asked to bear.

'Are you quite all right, dear?' Laura asked. She enjoyed the role of the concerned wife, particularly when she had an audience to appreciate her concern. He didn't mind. It made her happy. Sometimes it even made him happy too.

'You look as if you're in pain. Or discomfort of some kind.'

'I'm fine,' he said, easing into his seat. 'Just famished.'

'Amen to that,' said Surgeon Mangan.

'Excuse my lateness,' Lord Kingscourt said. 'There are two little chaps I know who insist on being told bedtime stories.'

The Mail Agent, a father, gave a strange, baleful smile. Merridith's wife rolled her eyes like a doll.

'Our girl Mary is ill again,' she said.

Mary Duane was their nanny, a native from Carna in County Galway. David Merridith had known her all his life.

'I don't know what's come over that girl,' Lady Kingscourt continued. 'She's barely left her cabin since the moment we boarded. When usually she's hale as a Connemara pony. And quite as bloody-minded as one too.' She held up her fork and gazed at it closely, for some reason gently pricking her fingertips with the ends of the tines.

'Perhaps she is homesick,' Lord Kingscourt said.

His wife laughed briefly. 'I hardly think so.'

'I notice some of the sailorboys giving her the glad eye,' said the Surgeon affably. 'Pretty little thing if she didn't wear so much black.'

'She was bereaved of her husband not too long ago,' said Merridith. 'So she probably shan't notice the sailorboys I should think.'

'Oh dear, oh dear. Hard thing at her age.'

'Quite.'

Wine was poured. Bread was offered. A steward brought a tureen and began to serve the vichyssoise.

Lord Kingscourt was finding it difficult to concentrate. A worm of pain corkscrewed slowly through his groin: a stone-blind maggot of piercing venom. He could feel his shirt sticking to his shoulders and abdomen. The Dining Saloon had an ashy, stagnant atmosphere, as though pumped dry of air and filled up with pulverised lead. Against the cloying odour of meat and over-bloomed lilies another more evil stench was trying to gain. What in the name of Christ was that filthy smell?

The Surgeon had clearly been in the middle of one of his interminable stories when Merridith had arrived. He resumed telling it now, chuckling expansively, enfeebled by duckish clucks of self-amusement as he gaped around at the dutifully simpering company. Something about a pig who could talk. Or dance? Or stand on its hind legs and sing Tom Moore. It was an Irish peasant story anyway: all of the Surgeon's were. Gintilmin. Sorr. Jayzus be savin' Yer Worship. He tugged his invisible forelock and puffed out his cheeks, so juicily proud of his facility for imitation. It was something Merridith found hard to stomach, the way the prosperous Irish were never done lampooning their rural countrymen: a sign, they often claimed, of their own maturity on matters national, but in truth just another form of cringing obsequiousness.

'Will you tell me now,' the Surgeon chortled, his bright eyes streaming with excess of mirth, 'where else could that happen but darlin' auld Oirland?'

He spoke the last three words as though in inverted commas.

'Wonderful people,' agreed the heavily perspiring Mail Agent. 'A marvellous logic all their own.'

The Maharajah said nothing for a few long moments, grim-faced and bored in his stiff robes. Then he muttered a few gloomy syllables and snapped his fingers to his personal butler who was standing like a Guardian Angel a few feet behind him. The butler brought over a small silver box, which the Maharajah reverently opened. Out of it he took a pair of spectacles. He looked at them for a moment, as though surprised to have found them there. Cleaned them with a napkin and put them on.

'You'll remain at New York for some time, Lord Kingscourt?'

It took a moment for Merridith to realise whom the Captain was addressing.

'Indeed,' he said. 'I mean to go into business, Lockwood.'

Inevitably Dixon gave him a look. 'Since when did the gentry stoop to working for a living?'

'There's a famine in progress in Ireland, Dixon. I assume you stumbled across it on your visit there, did you?'

The Captain gave an apprehensive laugh. 'I'm sure our American friend meant no offence, Lord Kingscourt. He only thought - '

'I'm quite aware of what he thought. How can an Earl be fallen low as a tradesman? In a way my dear wife often thinks the same thing.' He looked across the table at her. 'Don't you, Laura?'

Lady Kingscourt said nothing. Her husband went back to his soup. He wanted to eat it before it coagulated.

'Yes. So you see my predicament, Dixon. Not a man on my estate has paid rent for four years. My father's death leaves me with half of all the bogland in southern Connemara, a great deal of stones and bad turf, a greater deal of overdue accounts and unpaid wages. Not to mention the considerable duties owing to the government.' He broke a piece of bread and took a sip of wine. 'Dying is rather expensive,' he smiled darkly at the Captain. 'Unlike this claret. Which is muck.'

Lockwood glanced uneasily around the table. He wasn't accustomed to dealing with the aristocracy.

Excerpted from  Star of the Sea  © Copyright 2002 by Joseph O'Connor. Reprinted with permission by Harvest Books, an imprint of Harcourt Trade Publishers. All rights reserved.

Star of the Sea by by Joseph O'Connor

• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• ISBN-10: 0156029669
• ISBN-13: 9780156029667
• About the Book
• Discussion Questions
• Reading Guide (PDF)
• Critical Praise

What is the 'God Bless the USA Bible'? The $60 Bible Trump and Lee Greenwood are selling

Donald Trump is now in the business of selling Bibles, according to an announcement made Tuesday.

Trump announced the partnership with country music singer Lee Greenwood, best known for his song "God Bless the USA". The pair is selling a custom version of the Bible for $59.99, called the " God Bless the USA Bible," which was previously announced in 2021 by Greenwood but then fell to the wayside after hitting snafus with publishing.

"All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It's my favorite book," Trump said in a video posted on social media "It's a lot of peoples' favorite book."

"We have to bring Christianity back into our lives and into what will be again a great nation," Trump said. "Our Founding Fathers did a tremendous thing when they built America on Judeo-Christian values. Now that foundation is under attack, perhaps as never before."

The announcement comes as Trump is embroiled in several legal battles, leaving him reportedly strapped for cash. He recently posted a $91 million bond as he appeals a jury award in a defamation case and, on Monday a New York state appeals court ruling imposed an additional $175 million bond while he appeals a civil fraud verdict against him. He will owe another $354 million plus interest if he loses the appeal.

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

Trump has denied that he is facing financial issues and a disclaimer on the controversial Bible's website claims it "has nothing to do with any political campaign" and is "not owned, managed or controlled by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization, CIC Ventures LLC or any of their respective principals or affiliates."

What exactly is this self-proclaimed patriotic version of the Bible and what does it have to do with a country song from the 1980s? Here's what we know.

Trump bibles: Donald Trump is selling $60 Bibles as he seeks funds for for campaign, legal bills

What is the 'God Bless the USA Bible'?

The "God Bless the USA Bible" is a version of the Christian Bible "inspired by Lee Greenwood's patriotic anthem 'God Bless the USA,'" according to the official God Bless The USA Bible website.

Touting itself as the "only Bible endorsed by President Trump" and Greenwood himself, it incorporates copies of American political documents and Greenwood's song lyrics into the copy.

A "spotlight" section on the website shows other conservative personalities posing with a copy of the bible, including Tomi Lahren, Donal Trump Jr., Rita Cosby, Travis Tritt and Gov. Mike Huckabee.

According to the website, "high order volume" means customers will have to wait four to six weeks for delivery.

What is in the 'God Bless the USA Bible'?

The "God Bless the USA Bible" is the King James Version translation interspersed with copies of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance and handwritten lyrics to the chorus of “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood.

According to the Bible's website, it comes in a large print, two-column format.

Christian nationalism on the rise: As Trump support merges with Christian nationalism, experts warn of extremist risks

Who is Lee Greenwood?

Melvin Lee Greenwood is an American  country music  singer-songwriter. He has released more than 20 major-label albums but is best known for his 1984 patriotic song "God Bless the USA."

Greenwood identifies as a conservative Republican and Christian and his song has often been used at Republican political rallies and conventions. It has been used in the campaigns of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and more recently, Donald Trump.

President Bush nominated Greenwood to serve on the National Council of Arts, which he did from 2008 to 2022. In 2018, Greenwood was awarded the MMP Music Award and was inducted into the MMP Hall of Fame by Commander Joseph W. Clark.

'God Bless the USA Bible' controversies, response

Constitutional and legal scholars, as well as people in the Christian church, have rebuffed the existence of a Bible that mixes religion and legal doctrine. When the concept was first announced, it received notable backlash.

In 2021, HarperCollins Christian Publishing  refused to manufacture the book after a preliminary agreement, leading Greenwood and Hugh Kirkpatrick, who led the company Elite Service Pro behind the custom Bible, to look elsewhere for publishing.

HarperCollins Christian Publishing, which includes Zondervan and Thomas Nelson publishing groups, is the North American licensor for the New International Version translation of the Bible, which ultimately was not used in the "God Bless the USA" version. Instead, it uses the King James Version translation.

It is now unclear who the publisher and licensor of the new version is. Greenwood's publicist previously told the Nashville Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY network, that Elite Source Pro is no longer a partner on the project. He was unable to name the new licensee who is manufacturing the Bible.

StarTribune

Minneapolis writer's book is being made into movie starring oscar winners russell crowe and rami malek.

While most of us are dealing with spring drear this week, Minneapolis writer Jack El-Hai will be in Budapest, hobnobbing with actors Russell Crowe and Rami Malek.

Those two Oscar winners (Crowe for "Gladiator," Malek for "Bohemian Rhapsody") are currently filming "Nuremberg," an adaptation of El-Hai's book, "The Nazi and the Psychiatrist." They play the title roles: Crowe is Hermann Göring, one of Adolf Hitler's top officials, and Malek is Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, hired to determine if Göring was fit to stand trial for war crimes.

The book's journey to the big screen has been long. Its writer is the first to acknowledge that his nonfiction book was not a big seller when it was published in 2013. But Hollywood hopped on "Nuremberg" even before it was published, having noticed the story when El-Hai "test-drove" it with a magazine feature about Göring and Kelley. The now-defunct production company that purchased the first option on the book renewed it multiple times in the intervening years.

The enduring attraction of the tale? Its two strong central characters.

"I always refer to it as King Kong vs. Godzilla in a fight to the death," joked El-Hai (who was unaware that "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" just opened).

With writer/director James Vanderbilt finally at the helm, "Nuremberg" was set to film in spring 2023, but strikes by the actors and writers unions cut it off.

As filming drew near, Malek reached out to El-Hai for more information about Kelley, and El-Hai stands ready to answer more questions when he visits the set for a couple of days, starting April 5.

"I know a little about how [Malek] sees the character," said El-Hai. "The movie covers only some of the years that are covered in the book — the run-up to the first Nuremberg trial and a tiny bit afterwards. But Rami, who had read the book, was interested in talking with me about Kelley's early and later years. I hope when I'm in Hungary I'll have more chances to do that on the set," El-Hai said.

But he's not sure what his role will be. "We'll see if anyone wants that from me or if I'll be more of a spectator," he added.

Either is fine by El-Hai, who's keenly aware that books and films tell stories in different ways.

"What I'm looking for is a creative person who can really focus on a tough conflict that's in the story and pull forth from that the best dramatic possibilities," said El-Hai. "I didn't hope a movie based on 'The Nazi and the Psychiatrist' would be like this or like that. I wanted to see what it would become and I'm very happy with what it is becoming."

There will be more trips to see how others re-imagine El-Hai's work. "Nazi" also has been adapted into a play, "Sense of Decency." El-Hai and his wife, Ann Aronson, will attend opening night April 20, at California's North Coast Repertory Theatre.

Meanwhile, El-Hai's "The Lobotomist" also was sold to Hollywood before it was published in 2005 and the writer said there's a script in place that may finally make it before cameras.

The prolific nonfiction author has written five books, including Minnesota-set "The Lost Brothers," and dozens of magazine articles. He publishes the free monthly newsletter Damn History, which focuses on popular history and he blogs the behind-the-scenes stories of his work at el-hai.com .

El-Hai is currently at work on two more books that could interest moviemakers: "Face in the Mirror," due next year, is about a young man who received a full-face transplant at the Mayo Clinic. And the tentatively titled "The Case of the Autographed Corpse" is about an Apache medicine man who was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and who reached out to "Perry Mason" writer Erle Stanley Gardner for assistance in helping to overturn his conviction.

No release date for "Nuremberg" has been announced but, given the talent involved, Oscar prognosticators are already including the film in early predictions for next year's awards, which suggests it could reach theaters before the end of the year.

Interim books editor Chris Hewitt previously worked at the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, where he wrote about movies and theater.

• Here's the story LSU coach Kim Mulkey threatened with legal action
• Uber, Lyft drivers using Hertz program told to return cars, leaving gap before May 1 pullout
• Gruesome video shown at trial on fatal Apple River stabbing
• Gophers top Wyoming to reach WNIT semifinals as Battle takes over late
• Paige Bueckers lifts UConn back to the Final Four with 80-73 win over JuJu Watkins and USC
• Sensational Clark scores 41 to lead Iowa past LSU into Final Four

After welcoming guests for 67 years, the Tropicana Las Vegas casino's final day has arrived

Powerball jackpot rises to $1.09 billion after 3-month-long losing streak continues

On french riviera hillsides, the once-dominant menton lemon gets squeezed by development, japan's royal family makes formal debut on instagram as world's oldest monarchy tries to draw youth, music review: vampire weekend's frenetic, challenging 'only god was above us' is an ode to new york.

• A novel idea: These Minnesota book clubs are silent • Books
• His book may not have sold a ton of copies but Minneapolis writer Jack El-Hai's work is about to become a movie with Rami Malek and Russell Crowe • Books
• REVIEW: 'The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times,' by Anthony DePalma • Books
• REVIEW: "The Elimination," by Rithy Panh with Christophe Bataille, translated by John Cullen. • Books
• Sen. Al Franken to write 'psychological thriller' book about D.C. • Books

© 2024 StarTribune. All rights reserved.

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts

Become an FT subscriber

Limited time offer save up to 40% on standard digital.

• Global news & analysis
• Expert opinion
• Special features
• FirstFT newsletter
• Videos & Podcasts
• Android & iOS app
• FT Edit app
• 10 gift articles per month

Explore more offers.

Standard digital.

• FT Digital Edition

Premium Digital

Print + premium digital.

Then $75 per month. Complete digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Cancel anytime during your trial.

• 10 additional gift articles per month
• Global news & analysis
• Exclusive FT analysis
• Videos & Podcasts
• FT App on Android & iOS
• Everything in Standard Digital
• Premium newsletters
• Weekday Print Edition

Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders. Pay a year upfront and save 20%.

• Everything in Print
• Everything in Premium Digital

The new FT Digital Edition: today’s FT, cover to cover on any device. This subscription does not include access to ft.com or the FT App.

Terms & Conditions apply

Explore our full range of subscriptions.

Why the ft.

See why over a million readers pay to read the Financial Times.

International Edition