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The Homecoming Seasons: An Irish Catholic Returns to a Changing Long Island is a deeply moving memoir of a returning native's re-experience of his childhood community. After many years abroad as a graduate student at Cambridge, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand, and as a country program director of health care and agricultural programs in central Africa, James MacGuire returned to New York and spent most of the 1980s at Time Inc., Macmillan and the Manhattan Institute. In 1990 he married and several years later, with a second child on the way, he and his wife decamped from Manhattan for a small enclave called the Isle of Wight in the village of Lawrence on the south shore of Long Island, where MacGuire had grown up. This book tells the story of MacGuire’s return to this world—how it had evolved from ancient times; been inhabited by indigenous peoples; colonized by the Dutch and English; and then grew from a sparsely populated agricultural corner of western Long Island to an early summer resort, then an outer, and, finally, an inner suburb of New York City. Jamie MacGuire skillfully weaves memories of his childhood in this almost hidden world with sketches of his family and their friends before updating his account with a lovingly detailed, diary-like depiction of returning. His parents’ friends now much older, the community more diverse, as he, his wife and children make new friends as they proceed into this changed world. He captures in cinematic detail the wonder of the wetlands and surrounding natural world, the poignant life, death and rebirth of community, the joys and sorrows of marriage and parenthood, and the profound exultation of safely shepherding two beloved sons to triumphant adulthood. This is an uplifting literary memoir that will earn and deserve the widest possible audience.

In Worlds Within Worlds: A Fathers Poems and Prayers, James P. MacGuires poems celebrate the joys and challenges of love, marriage, fatherhood, children, work, loss, sorrow, doubt, and ultimately, resilient faith. With settings in New York, the Long Island shore, New England, Florida, Colorado, and Ireland, MacGuires poetry is alive with the seen and the unseen, the natural and the supernatural, quotidian realities, and sublimely spiritual illuminations.

The Marsh Decades is James P. MacGuire's poignant memoir of returning to his childhood hometown on Long Island to raise his own children, re-encountering its natural wetland beauty, his late parents' friends and making new ones in a community undergoing transition. The quarter century that the book details is filled with life, death, triumph, loss and chronicles a fragile yet ultimately resilient world.

Here is a revisitation--part tribute, part update--of Stephen Birmingham's much-loved Real Lace. James P. MacGuire, a member of one of Birmingham's Irish Families, creates his own entertaining portrait of life among the Irish Rich, further detailing and filling out this engrossing portion of America's social history. Real Lace Revisited chronicles the religious, financial and social evolution of the First Irish Families’ world, its rise, peak, decline, fall, and, in some cases, transformative rebirth. Rather than a memoir, however, the book reads as an informed historical, non-fiction account of the upper-class Irish world as it grew and changed. Real Lace Revisited is always accessible and highly readable, enlivened by MacGuire’s gift for storytelling, encyclopedic knowledge, and often humorous insight into the families concerned.

THE MARSH DECADES is James P. MacGuire's poignant memoir of returning to his childhood hometown on the South Shore of Long Island in his forties to raise his own family, reencountering its natural wetland beauty, his late parents' now older friends and making new ones in a community undergoing transition. The quarter century that the book details is filled with life, death, triumph, loss and chronicles a fragile yet ultimately resilient world.

James P. MacGuire's poignant coming of age memoir of the iconic 1960s is the perfect light reading for the summer of 2020 or any season, whether for Baby Boomers or those who came after. Set in a still bucolic Long Island, a Catholic boarding school on Narragansett Bay, in San Francisco, Wyoming, Washington, Woodstock and Minnesota's Outward Bound, the book chronicles the uncertainty, intensity, increasingly radical politics and confusion of the search for sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, racial justice, and God.James P. MacGuire's writing has appeared in many national publications. He is the author or co-author of fourteen books and two beloved sons, Pierce and Rhoads.

Here is a revisitation--part tribute, part update--of Stephen Birmingham's much-loved Real Lace.