Grappling with Ghosts
Childhood Memories from Postwar Ireland and London
By James Harvey
About the Book
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 recreates the daily struggles of life in post-war rural Ireland and bomb-shattered 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 grain.
This engrossing memoir grounds the struggles of the Harveys in both Irish history and British snobbery as the family fought for a place in the world. It takes the reader on a journey from the serenity of life in a rural 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.
Idyllic Childhood in Donegal, Ireland
“[My family members] looked at me oddly as I spoke casually of using a bike or horse and cart to get anywhere in Ireland, of priests dictating when you could take in your crops…of shillings for the gas meter, or of lamplighters wandering the streets of London to fire up gas street lamps… Indeed, looking back on it, I’m struck by what a strange and remote landscape it was, not just in Ireland but on both sides of the Irish Sea.”
— James Harvey, Grappling with Ghosts, “Preface”
Troubled Times in London
“I want to provide some sense of the sociology, authoritarianism, small-mindedness, and sanctimony that hung over all of us like great pious thunderclouds on both sides of the Irish Sea, undermining any conviction that individuals were entitled to their own opinions, should be able to control their own destinies, or could look forward to some pleasure and joy out of life.”
— James Harvey, Grappling with Ghosts, “Preface”
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About the Author
James Harvey
Following a career in government, James Harvey provided professional development opportunities for hundreds of American school superintendents over 30 years as executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable. He retired in 2022.
An expert on education in an international context, Harvey helped organize dozens of study missions to examine schools in China, Finland, England, France, and Cuba. He has provided keynote addresses on American education to audiences in Beijing, Bogotá, Dublin, Edinburgh, Havana, Helsinki, London, Paris, and Tokyo.
A native of Ireland, Harvey was educated in England, Ireland, and the United States. He is the author or co- author of dozens of articles and five books on education and education policy, including A Legacy of Learning (2000, with David Kearns former CEO of Xerox) and The Superintendent’s Fieldbook (2nd ed. 2013). He served as editor of A Nation at Risk (1983), the seminal report that launched the school reform movement. Early in his career, he served as a policy analyst and legislative specialist for the Committee on Education and Labor of the United States House of Representatives and as an education lobbyist for the Carter White House. A graduate of Villanova University, he holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate from Seattle University.
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Contact
James Harvey
harvey324@gmail.com
206.579.9272