The House of Memory: Reflections on Youth and War - Hardcover

"In this marvelous book, with its echoes of Angela's Ashes and Brooklyn, Freely paints an unforgettable portrait of a richly lived Irish American life. What's remarkable is how youthful his outlook has remained, and his humor and gratitude now seem to belong to a vanished gentility. Freely reminds us that the immigrant's tale is also the American one, a fact we'd do well to remember in our own times." --Cahir O'Doherty, Irish Central

"When young John Freely asked his mother if they belonged to the working class, she answered, 'We would indeed be of the working class if your father could find steady work.' Mr. Freely was born in 1926, the son of two Irish immigrants struggling to gain a toehold in Brooklyn . . . The nonagenarian author's account of the first quarter of his life might be considered his contribution to the canon of the impoverished Irish, though life would soon carry him far from his upbringing . . . Mr. Freely volunteered [to the Navy in 1944] and was placed in 'Amphibious Roger Three, ' a Navy unit that was being sent to China to train elite forces in the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek . . . In "The House of Memory," Mr. Freely has provided an account of how a world at war transformed the fate even of those who barely saw action." --Gregory Crouch, The Wall Street Journal

"The nonagenarian author of scores of books about travel and history returns with a memoir about his boyhood, youth, and World War II. Freely displays an unusually precise memory . . . Such specificity adds an almost surreal clarity to the text." --Kirkus Reviews

An engaging, funny, and tender memoir from a man of ninety years: of growing up poor in a Brooklyn and Ireland that now exist only in memory, and of serving in the China/Burma/India theater during World War II as a member of an elite U.S. Navy commando unit

John Freely's voice is still astonishingly youthful, full of wonder, humor, and gratitude, as he remembers his fully lived life. Born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrants, he went to Ireland with his mother when he was five, where he spent his young childhood on his grandfather's farm. Western Ireland was impoverished by the times, but rich in beauty and intriguing people, and it opened in him a lifelong desire to see the world and its inhabitants. When he was seven, he returned to Brooklyn, and the antics of a coming-of-age boy played out on streets filled with character and characters. He took whatever jobs he could when times got tough, always shaking off his losses and moving on, hungry to see and experience what was next. He joined the U.S. Navy at seventeen to "see the world," and did just that. In wartime, while bringing supplies and ammunition over the Stilwell-Burma Road to Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese guerrilla forces, Freely served alongside them during the last weeks of World War II in the Tibetan borderlands of China, a Shangri-la that war had turned into hell on earth.