From seaside summer holidays to vacations at an uncle's farm to everyday life in the town of Newry, this evocative and humorous memoir conjures a vivid picture of an ordinary--yet fascinating--Irish childhood in the 1940s and 1950s. Brian Cosgrove here describes a large, affectionate family dominated by the figures of his father, a hard-working pub owner, and his mother, an "ordinary/extraordinary" woman who died following a long battle with cancer when the author was nineteen. The world Cosgrove meticulously recreates is one of carefree adolescent adventure, of comic books, boys' adventure stories, and popular films. But--as he sees more clearly looking back--every aspect of the life Cosgrove describes is permeated by the influence of a Catholic--and frequently Irish Nationalist--ethos, and as he explores his childhood, the social and political issues of twentieth-century Irish history reveal themselves in unexpected ways. Lighthearted and serious in turn, "The Yew Tree at the Head of the Strand brings to poignant life a world made beautiful and fascinating not by the false light of nostalgia, but through the sharply rendered details of everyday existence.