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Title: Crossing Highbridge: A Memoir of Irish America (Irish Studies (Syracuse, N.Y.).) by Maureen Waters ISBN: 0-8156-0682-6 Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr (Trade) Pub. Date: April, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (4 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Emotionally Stirring By A Most Literate Writer
Comment: I could relate to nearly everything that Miss Waters wrote about in Crossing Highbridge, because I came from that Irish Catholic enclave, I knew the Waters family long ago, and I went to Sacred Heart with Maureen's sister, Agnes.

Maureen Waters is a gifted writer who combines history, philosophy, religion, and the socio-econimic conditions in a working class environment in the 1940's and 1950's, with utter grace, and at the same time, the reader can experience some strong emotions of saddness and joy.

Rating: 5
Summary: Happiness and sorrows of a truly literary person
Comment: I was able to identify with nearly everything Miss Waters wrote about her Irish Catholic upbringing in Highbridge, because I too came from the same place, and I knew her sister Agnes many, many years ago. However, if I had not had the privilege of knowing Maureen and her literary family, I would still have been able to appreciate the writer's gift of style where she combined gracefully, history, philosophy, religion along with the socioeconomic conditions of the 1940's and 1950's growing up in Highbridge.

Rating: 5
Summary: A Grief Understood
Comment: This profoundly moving memoir of growing up Irish/Catholic/female in the midcentury Bronx began with the author's need to understand the loss of her son to accidental death by drugs and alcohol. As she puts it, "the drive to piece together cause and effect was a belief that I had far more power than I actually did for good or ill." She sifts the past out of psychological necessity, desperate, guilty, and finds ordinary treasure: in human characters - her father, an immigrant from Sligo, her mother from Mayo, a feisty and lovable little sister, Agnes, and, above all, in her beautiful and enigmatic lost child of the flaming red hair, Brian Patrick - and also in their brave and lonely human places (Highbridge on Hudson, Long Island). She looks back for clues to her loss from the perspective of a divorced single mother trying to juggle children and hold her own in academe (she's now a professor of English). Memory sifted through the prism of such luminous prose and honest emotion offers a gentle and moving consolation to this reader. The story of the author's Catholic journey, from insider - the parish was Sacred Heart - to outsider is told with devastating brevity. I'll never forget the final image of women's exclusion. It rings so true. The abyss is present in Waters' world, but to me this is a book of hope