Rockin' the Bronx

by Larry Kirwan

On a rash quest to track down his girlfriend Mary, naïve Irishman Sean Kelly becomes embroiled in the hellish wasteland of the 1980s Bronx. He stays on, determined to uncover the reason behind the sudden change in Mary. But the only job available for an undocumented Paddy is hard labor, and the only solace is found in beer and music. A vibrant, colorful evocation of New York City in the watershed years through the eyes of four young Irish immigrants, Rockin' the Bronx captures the visceral realities of life and death in the Irish slum-scape on Bainbridge Avenue. Faced with the excesses of the early 80 drugs, aids, the Burning Bronx, and at home, the Troubles, Sean eventually emerges into manhood. ""Larry Kirwan writes with all the charm of his music. This is Angela's Ashes for a new generation.""--Thomas Keneally. ""A tremendous rock `n' roll saga . The prolific Kirwan offers writing about the transformative and curative powers of music and performance that is brilliant on its own, but his lovingly rendered portrait of American and Irish social and political realties in the 1980s is both brutal and magical."" -Library Journal ""A brilliant tales set in the gritty streets of the Yankee borough that was the epicenter of Irish Americana during the early eighties."" - Irish Voice ""Rockin' the Bronx has a headlong momentum and street-level immediacy, teeming with drama, romance, and politics."" - Philadelphia Inquirer

376 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2010

About the author

Larry Kirwan (born 1948 in Wexford, Ireland) is an expatriate Irish writer and musician, most noted as the lead singer for the New York based Irish rock band, Black 47.

Prior to Black 47, Kirwan and fellow Wexfordian Pierce Turner led the new wave band Major Thinkers, based in New York City.

Kirwan has also written and produced several plays which have been performed in the United States and Europe, most of which deal with Irish history and politics, particularly Northern Ireland. He has made statements in support of the Irish Republican Army.

Since April 2005, he has hosted "Celtic Crush," a radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio that features Celtic artists from a wide variety of genres.

He is a naturalized U.S. citizen, having emigrated in 1970. He is married to June, and they have two children.

Reviews

[Janellyn51 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Larry's book for a variety of reasons. One being, in 1980, I met a whacked bass player who was playing in a band in Boston, while also playing with an Irish band in NYC, the Major Thinkers. Larry and Pierce Turner's band. My soon to be husband and I sublet Larry's East Village Apartment, and I spent a fair amount of time going to gigs, and living among Larry's things, his music, his words. I like Larry a lot, and am impressed with where his Irishness has taken him, his writing and Black 47. Larry and Pierce went back to Ireland to visit their families and organized a tour to finance their trip, so I got left alone in NYC, not knowing anyone, jobless, with $70.00 that my husband left for me for food. I got a job at Trash and Vaudeville. He had dyed his hair, and got food poisoning, so when I met the band at the airport, my future husbands hair was yellow and his skin was green. Lennon was murdered, Princess Di and Charles got married...I remember one gig in an Irish bar in the Bronx, with a guy grabbing my ass really hard, and telling my husband, fully expecting him to defend the honor of his blushing bride....he asked me if I was out of my mind! Anyway. I did enjoy the book. I didn't have a whole lot of sympathy for Mary...and more often than not I wanted to slap Sean up side his head. Danny and his problems, as yet unidentified reminded me more than anything of the time and fear as things developed. The thing I most related to, was Sean landing in NY and not getting that the most important thing is to walk with purpose and no matter how scared you are, or how lost, you have to act like you know what you're doing. They can smell it, and they will mess with you, and even if they have no intentions of hurting you, they will mess with you just to see you pee your pants. He really got that across in Sean's blindly searching for Decatur.

[Lavender · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the fast pace of this book. The characters were written in a compelling way. As the story unfolded, you were never quite sure which way it was going to go.

[Martin Nutty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Larry Kirwan's Rockin the Bronx charts the last big wave of Irish emigration to America. Part of this migration fetched up in the Bronx's Bainbridge neighborhood in the early 80s. The denizens of Kirwan's novel are undocumented, undereducated, and underemployed. The men take body-breaking construction site jobs while the women nanny for wealthy Manhattanites to the South.

Kirwan's protagonist, Seán, comes in search of his lost love, Mary, who has disappeared into the maw of the Bronx. Seán's naivety slams into the harsh reality of undocumented life in the early days of Reaganism in New York City's most northerly borough. Drug abuse, rampant criminality, Irish hunger strikes, epic boozing, and the beginnings of the AIDS crisis all suffuse and surround the story with manic intensity.

Crusted in daily concrete dust, Seán flounders obtusely in the quest to restore his relationship with a troubled Mary. He finds meaning beyond the hard labor of summer-scorched building sites when he forms a band with his roommate Danny, whose past is clouded by Northern Ireland's Troubles. Together, they tour the heaving dance halls and bars of the Bronx while coalescing around a new sound that taps into the manic energy of their homesick expat community.

I imagine much of what Kirwan writes, drapes autobiographical detail. Having fronted Black 47, the author was deeply familiar with the scene he writes of in Rockin' the Bronx. The novel masterfully portrays the loneliness, bewilderment, and striving of the last wave of Irish migration, which crashed in economic desperation on America's shores. Many of Bainbridge's pubs are shuttered now, the Irish community of the 80s has moved. Many ultimately achieved legal residency, others returned to the booming Celtic-Tiger Irish economy which exploded in the 90s, some still lurk, undocumented in the shadows of Trump's America.

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Black 47
Larry Kirwan is a very talented writer too.

[Murph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rocker/author/playwright Larry Kirwan's fictional tale of young Irish immigrants in the early 1980s Bronx.

[Emmet Mahon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favourite book of all time. I find it very easy to relate to.

[Diana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Larry Kirwan is a wonderful Irish musician, author, performance artist who lives in NYC. Kirwan is the heart of the Irish rock group Black 47. His music is powerful, usually political and quite addictive. He's a great guy. But I just couldn't get into his novels. Perhaps it's a cultural thing...even though this book is set in the U.S. the lingo and cultural references were just too hard to for me to "get".

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the music of Black 47 and lots of things that Larry Kirwan does but this book never quiet worked for me. Too many adjectives and too much energy but not enough on the plot. I kept wanting to shout at him to slow down.

[Rajesh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Love the band (Black 47) but only like the book. At best. It did have the same lyrical, poetic, madness feel as the band, which I liked, but ultimately there are better authors.

[Colleen Flaherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed it.