Bob Ginna is a Harvard lecturer who has had a long association with Ireland. Well known in literary America, he thought it would be a good idea to mark his 75th year by taking a stroll through Ireland, starting at Malin Head and finishing in Kinsale. He sold the idea to Random House and was given what he describes as a generous advance.
He admitted recently that even if his idea had been turned down, he would have gone ahead. He had gone to the publishing house with a 20-page proposal and it struck a chord. He set out on September 15th and finished his odyssey a few weeks ago. It was, he says, a compelling experience and an enlightening one.
He first came to Ireland in 1953 and befriended the late Seamus Kelly, Quidnunc of this newspaper. While making radio programmes with Sean O'Casey and a film of his life, he became very close to the playwright and is still close to the surviving members of his family.
He has written extensively in America about Irish culture and by virtue of his Irish ancestry, holds dual citizenship - Ginna, he believes, may be a variant of McKenna. While he professes a deep love for Ireland, he does not intend his book to be a rose-tinted view of where we are now as against where we were when he first came here in the 1950s.
It was a poorer Ireland then but there was more common civility, he says, adding that he has noticed over the years in the letters page of The Irish Times how concern is growing about the decline in this facet of Irish life. Everywhere on his rambles he heard of the Celtic Tiger and the booming economy. Everywhere, too, there was talk of how standards had not only slipped but tumbled in high places. Is this the price we have to pay, he wonders.
Of course, the snail's-pace lifestyle of almost five decades ago has disappeared, and there is palpable evidence of prosperity all around.
He has found that we have been shoddy about protecting the environment. He was at a loss to understand why a city such as Cork is only now tackling the problem of untreated sewage being dumped daily into its river system.
As his journey progressed, he noted such things, including the day when the water into which an angler in the west was casting his fly suddenly turned ugly brown near a sewage outfall pipe. These are not the images Bord Failte likes to project.
His book is due out on February 1st and it may be chastening to see what Ginna's keen eye has picked up between Malin Head and Kinsale.
In his past, he was editor-in-chief of Little Brown and Co, part of the Time/Warner group, assistant managing editor of Life magazine and one of the founding editors of People magazine. He was also one of the founders of Horizon magazine and editor of Scientific America.