From time as a child in an orphanage to writing speeches for presidents, James Harvey travelled a rocky road to live out the American dream.

In this memoir of his childhood, Harvey recreated the daily struggles of life in postwar rural Ireland and bomb-shattreed London. Ireland, just 30 years removed from 700 years of British domination, had scarcely emerged from the 19th century. London, shrouded in fog and greasy coal soot, was the epicenter of an exhausted debtor nation, still clinging to an image of British exceptionalism as a young Queen Elizabeth took the throne and the empire circled the drain.

This engrossing memoir grounds the struggles of the Harveys in both Irish history and English snobbery as the family fought for a place in the sun. It takes the reader on a journey from the serenity of life in a Donegal thatched cottage . . . through alcohol-fueled domestic violence in the Kilburn area bordering London's Paddington and St. John's Wood neighborhoods . . . to the anguish of emigration.