Elizabeth Shannon.

Elizabeth Shannon directs the Trustee Scholar and International Visitors programs at Boston University.

This is the Time of the Irish. Of course, if you are Irish, you know it won't last because nothing good ever does. But take the summer to revel in it with Irish America Coming into Clover: The Evolution of a People and a Culture (Doubleday, $25, 320 pp.) by Boston Globe staff writer Maureen Dezell. She probes the psyche of Irish Americans with humor, sympathy, and acerbic insight, and tracks their movement from immigrant poverty to a secure place in today's prosperity.

"The Irish," writes Dezell, quoting Mary Gordan, "have managed to do these things no one else could do...the English told them they couldn't learn to read, and they produced some of the best literature in the English language. Their church wasn't supposed to exist, and it became the strongest Catholic church in the world. A whole population is wiped out by famine and they come here with no skills, no money, no family, and prosper beyond anyone's expectations." That was achieved, however, not totally without succumbing to the oldest Irish bugaboo, a "swelled head."

Dezell notes that whereas "emotional reserve and humility are considered virtues in Ireland," the Irish in America have "bowdlerized and hyperdramatized their heritage," creating a brash culture of their own. Chicago Irish dance star Michael Flatley serves as "a consummate example of Irish Americanism in overdrive...with his dyed hair, faux brogue, razzle-dazzle, and Disneyfied renditions of Irish dance, he is emblematic of much that the native Irish both loathe and begrudgingly admire in their embarrassing immigrant cousins." It was that very razzle-dazzle that put poor Irish Americans into political office and board rooms, two of the places they are now most at home. At the same time, the rise of Irish American studies programs and increased travel to Ireland as a cultural "homeland" have done much to narrow the breach between immigrant and native cultures.

Dezell's book is noteworthy for the attention she gives to a neglected area of Irish American history: immigrant women. Her chapter "Bridget, Open the Door," on the Irish servant girl, is fresh and fascinating. Teenagers who had spent their lives in remote cottages in the west of Ireland crossed the Atlantic alone in steerage and a few weeks later were "serving squab from Limoges china in Boston's Back Bay or polishing silver in Fifth Avenue homes." At the turn of the century, in distinction from their European counterparts, 60 percent or more of Irish immigrants were single women. These women saved their money and sent it home to help pay the fares of their siblings. And they contributed a significant amount of their income to the Catholic church. It is a bitter irony that "there is virtually no mention of women in the standard texts of American Catholic history," writes historian Mary Jo Weaver. Heretofore nearly all the women in standard Irish American histories have appeared as sisters and wives.

Not that those stories aren't fascinating too, as Katie Hickman's new Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives (Morrow, $25, 352 pp.) amply demonstrates. Herself a diplomatic daughter, Hickman chronicles the experiences of British Foreign Service wives from the seventeenth century until the mid-l990s. From copious letters (collected and saved when letter writing was the only way far-flung wives had of keeping in touch with family and friends at home), from diaries, journals, and personal interviews, she has put together a well-written history, both scholarly in research and vastly entertaining.

As a group, diplomatic wives appear enterprising, stalwart, and brave. They faced danger, loneliness, and illness in far-off and sometimes primitive lands. Some, such as Vita Sackville-West whose husband, Harold Nicholson, was posted in Persia, rebelled. She found her duties frivolous and came home. Others found their social obligations daunting. "The height of my earthly aspirations is to be allowed to abstain from pleasure," Countess Granville wrote to her sister in 1825, exhausted from a endless series of soirees in Paris.

Until air travel became accessible, just "getting there" was a formidable challenge. Traveling "light" was not in the vocabulary of these nomads. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, keeping a large diplomatic household supplied with food and other necessities could be a nightmare, and diplomats and their wives took what they could to supplement often meager supplies. "The prize...must surely go to Lady Carlisle who, when her husband made his public entry into Moscow in 1663, accompanied him in her own carriage...followed by 200 sledges loaded with luggage." Even as late as the l960s, when food supplies were difficult to come by in Russia, the attic of the British Embassy in Moscow was turned into a vast chicken coop so that the staff could enjoy the luxury of fresh eggs. (While I served in Dublin with my late husband, Ambassador William Shannon, I raised my own chickens for eggs, cows for milk and beef, and tended a huge vegetable garden...not that all of these things weren't easily available in Ireland, but it stretched a tight embassy budget!)

Diplomats are often the targets of terrorists around the world. Hickman and her family were posted at the British embassy in Dublin in l976 when Ambassador Christopher Ewart Biggs was blown up in his car by the IRA as he traveled from his home to his office. His widow tells Hickman "perhaps too much is asked of diplomatic wives; they are shot at and bombed, their children taken from them, they waste away by tropical disease, their husbands kidnapped or even killed, but they are always expected to be there, to look nice, to say the right thing, to have no definite views of their own, and to remember everyone's names."

Certainly, air travel and rapid communication have eased the lives of today's diplomatic families. Nevertheless, it is still difficult for a spouse to follow a diplomat from post to post, and pursue any career other than the partnership requires. The lucky couples are the ones in which husband and wife share a sense of adventure, a love of travel, and the flexibility to settle into new and foreign situations, and where both are happy to serve their country "for the price of one."