The Stephanie Flint Book Club, celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year, is hosting an appearance at the Berlin Free Town Library by Kevin O’Hara. The acclaimed author from nearby Pittsfield, MA, will read from and speak about his experience in writing his latest book, A Lucky Irish Lad, that was released in February.
Two years ago the Book Club read and discussed with great pleasure O’Hara’s first book, Last of the Donkey Pilgrims, a magical tale of his 1979 journey walking around the whole of Ireland with Missy,
the donkey with an Irish mind of her own. Members are looking forward to meeting Kevin and hearing about his growing up in a thoroughly Irish Catholic immigrant home in Pittsfield. Much of the locale that Kevin talks about will be familiar to folks on this side of the mountain.
The event, on Wednesday, June 9, at 7 pm, is open to the public and all are cordially invited. The Book Club also welcomes new members. Kevin will unabashedly be peddling his books and more than willing to scrawl his autograph on any copies you may have.
In the book’s acknowledgments Kevin mentions in particular, “My dear friend and publishing mentor Marc Jaffe [formerly of Berlin, now of Williamstown] for bringing not only my donkey travels to life, but now ‘Lucky’ as well.”
Kevin in his day job is a psychiatric nurse at Berkshire Medical Center. He has read from his writings on WAMC in Albany and WBUR in Boston, as well as at performances at The Berkshire Museum, the Stockbridge Library, the Clark Art Museum and the Either/Or Bookstore in Pittsfield. He is also a columnist for The Berkshire Eagle.
“Kevin O’Hara’s memoir of being Irish and growing up in small town America of the fifties and sixties captures the time, the place, and the ethnic family values with such an unerring eye that you’ll hear the bands on the Fourth of July, taste Mallo Cup candies, share in the cadences of the Rosary – and smell a young draftee’s fear in the horror that was the Vietnam War. This is memoir as tour de force.” – Patrick Taylor, New York Times bestselling author of An Irish Country Doctor.
“Kevin O’Hara crystallizes the Irish-American experience of the mid-Twentieth Century as vividly, as accurately and as humorously as anyone has yet. So read the book. You’ll feel lucky, too.” – William Martin, New York Times bestselling author of Back Bay and The Lost Constitution.