Ireland — Before reading Ulysses you should know who Buck Mulligan really was. Oliver St John Gogarty — surgeon, senator, poet, aviator, wit — deserves a biography as colorful as his life, and O'Connor delivers one.

Gogarty moved through early twentieth-century Dublin like a force of nature. He was friends with Yeats, drinking companions with Joyce before their falling out, and a champion swimmer who escaped captors by diving into the Liffey in winter. The stories pile up to the point of absurdity, except they are all true.

O'Connor writes with affection but doesn't shy from the contradictions. The portrait that emerges is of a man who lived at full volume in an era that rewarded it.

A wonderful companion read to Ulysses and to the Dublin literary scene more broadly.