Rogues and redeemers

About this book

This book is a behind-the-scenes portrait of the Irish power brokers who forged and fractured twentieth-century Boston. It tells the hidden story of Boston politics, the cold blooded ward bosses, the smoke-filled rooms, the larger-than-life pols who became national figures. It includes Honey Fitz, the crafty stage Irishman and grandfather to a president; the pugilistic Rascal King, Michael Curley; the hectored Kevin White who tried to hold the city together during the busing crisis; and Ray Flynn, the Southie charmer who was truly the last hurrah for Irish-American politics in the city. For almost a century, the Irish dominated Boston politics with their own unique, clannish brand of coercion and shaped its future for good and ill. The author, a former Boston Globe investigative reporter takes the reader through the entire journey from the famine ships arriving in Massachusetts Bay to the wresting of power away from the Brahmins of Beacon Hill to the Title I wars of attrition over housing to the rending of the city over busing to the Boston of today, which somehow through it all became a modern, revitalized city, albeit with a growing divide between the haves and have-nots.