I have written this book in an attempt to regain a lost heritage. My mother’s Irish family—Brickleys and McCarthys—was all gone by the year I was born. All grandparents, all uncles, all aunts, all gone. And my mother would never speak of her childhood on New York’s Lower East Side. She had suffered too many losses there. Since I knew my grandfather came from Skibbereen in County Cork, I went to Skibbereen in search of lost relatives. I found friends, music, stories and a green grassy space the size of a soccer field where 10,000 famine victims are buried. So, this search for the family became linked with a study of the Great Famine, En Gorta Mor. In the process, I came to understand that the terrible famine which beset the Irish in the 19th century was a prototype for the hunger and the disregard for the suffering of entire peoples from many countries, including my own. Relatives are found in unexpected places. Visits to Ireland with musician and cultural historian Mick Maloney helped me to overcome my sentimental ignorance. What I knew was a song or two and, as I grew into high school, the poems of Yeats. What I found were the musicians, the women, the community groups, the people of faith who made the Good Friday Accords possible. I will never forget visiting Derry and Belfast just after those accords were signed. That too is very much in this book. Poems do not make anything happen, as Auden says, but they certainly tell you what has happened to the poet. Slainte!