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Up in the Park: The Diary of the Wife of the American Ambassador to Ireland 1977-1981
Fine copy in fine dj
358 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1983
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December 23, 2018
I was reading John Banville’s Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir, and in it he mentioned having dined at Deer Park, the residence of the US Ambassador to Ireland, once, when Bill Shannon was ambassador. I suddenly remembered that I had a copy of Up in the Park, which is the diary of Shannon’s wife from those Ireland years. (And I remembered exactly where it was on our overburdened shelves, which is unusual, but hooray.)
In this diary Elizabeth Shannon is breezy and witty — somehow her tone reminded me of Olivia De Havilland’s Every Frenchman Has One — which is charming almost all of the time.
In addition to mothering their three sons, she naturally spends much of her time planning and hosting entertainments, which she treats with a light touch. She does mention John Banville in passing, but her bigger stories are about feminists in Ireland, about Irish culture, about the ever-dominant Catholicism, about the Iran hostage crisis, and about visits from all sorts of folks, including school groups, the wives of other ambassadors, Lillian Carter (mother of former US President Jimmy Carter), and, for the first time in Ireland, the Pope. She tells of trips around Ireland, many of which involve civic festivities or country homes, but also include meeting Traveller girls and inviting them to Deer Park. Her stories of visits to Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland, in the thick of The Troubles, are absorbing and sobering.
It’s a dated book, of course. So much has changed in forty years! And I have no interest for myself in the constant socializing and politicking that they lived with, nor in high society. Yet I enjoyed her report, however shined up and smoothed out, of a cultural and mores that seem far more distant today than they actually are.
In this diary Elizabeth Shannon is breezy and witty — somehow her tone reminded me of Olivia De Havilland’s Every Frenchman Has One — which is charming almost all of the time.
In addition to mothering their three sons, she naturally spends much of her time planning and hosting entertainments, which she treats with a light touch. She does mention John Banville in passing, but her bigger stories are about feminists in Ireland, about Irish culture, about the ever-dominant Catholicism, about the Iran hostage crisis, and about visits from all sorts of folks, including school groups, the wives of other ambassadors, Lillian Carter (mother of former US President Jimmy Carter), and, for the first time in Ireland, the Pope. She tells of trips around Ireland, many of which involve civic festivities or country homes, but also include meeting Traveller girls and inviting them to Deer Park. Her stories of visits to Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland, in the thick of The Troubles, are absorbing and sobering.
It’s a dated book, of course. So much has changed in forty years! And I have no interest for myself in the constant socializing and politicking that they lived with, nor in high society. Yet I enjoyed her report, however shined up and smoothed out, of a cultural and mores that seem far more distant today than they actually are.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review