Real Lace Revisited: Inside the Hidden World of America's Irish Aristocracy

by James P. MacGuire

James P. MacGuire, a member of one of Stephen Birmingham's Irish Families, creates his own entertaining portrait of life among the Irish Rich, further detailing and filling out this engrossing portion of America's social history.

Real Lace Revisited chronicles the religious, financial and social evolution of the First Irish Families’ world, its rise, peak, decline, fall, and, in some cases, transformative rebirth. Rather than a memoir, however, the book reads as an informed historical, non-fiction account of the upper-class Irish world as it grew and changed. Real Lace Revisited is always accessible and highly readable, enlivened by MacGuire’s gift for storytelling, encyclopedic knowledge, and often humorous insight into the families concerned.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

312 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2019

Reviews

[Terence Callery · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are perhaps just a handful of gifted writers who could have penned a book such as this fine accounting of America’s Irish families of wealth. James MacGuire’s fellow prep-school classmate and now his dear friend, Christopher Buckley (son of William F Buckley Jr) would be one writer that I could think of. What keeps these detailed chronicles from becoming a few dozen mini-biographies strung together is the way in which the author is connected to all of them. While the book is meticulously detailed and researched, the reader feels as if he is the beneficiary of a first hand verbal narrative as the story is now passed down to him. The author’s “insider” perspective comes from graduating from the same schools, attending the same weddings, socializing at the same clubs, playing squash and tennis on the same courts where a vast vessel of anecdotes, yarns and histories about these Irish families was stored away to eventually be retrieved for this book. MacGuire is an urbane and charming story-teller.