Exploring the themes of family love, loss, and national identity, the author describes his journey to Ireland to reconnect with his Irish identity, rediscover his parents' past, and define its links to his future.

In a moving, uproarious, and uniquely entertaining memoir, popular essayist Frank Gannon combines acerbic wit, personal revelation, and ten thousand years of history in a trans-Atlantic quest to discover what it is to be an Irish American in the new millennium. Immigrants Bernard and Annie Gannon never talked about their Irish past. So when Francis Xavier Gannon was growing up in 1950s New Jersey, his parents' native land was but a dim, distant mystery... Today Gannon is a middle-aged, irreverent Catholic who prefers Springsteen to Celtic Moods, can't dance a jig, and hates eating potatoes. Does that make him a bad Irish American? Or a typical one? With both parents dead, there's only one place Gannon could go to answer this question and find the missing pieces of his own heritage -- Planet Green. The Emerald Isle. Eire. Once there, his search to learn about the lives of young Bernard Gannon and Annie Forde became a quest to discover himself. -- Publisher description