Ambrose Clancy’s newest book is out: A writer revisits times, people and places

Longtime readers of Times Review Media Group newspaper, the Shelter Island Reporter, have gotten to know Editor Ambrose Clancy in black and white, through the word images formed by squiggles of ink against the white pages of this newspaper each week. The black-and-white squiggles sometimes morph into the gray shapes of unnerving ghost stories, or transform into the colors of a well-lived life in his memorial tributes to friends mourned by the community. 

Since he arrived in 2012, he’s helped illuminate events large and small in a small world sheltered by islands.

Quietly standing to the side of an event like the Veterans Day service, Memorial Day parade or the Turkey Plunge, he draws out Islanders to give voice to the quirks and sentiments of the men, women and children who call home a place they affectionately refer to as “The Rock.”

Now, some of Mr. Clancy’s memorable columns and feature writing for several publications — including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation and GQ, among others — have been captured in a new 480-page book entitled, “My Life in Pieces: Writers, Rogues, The Road and The Rock.”

The author of two other books, “Blind Pilot” and “The Night Line,” he worked with John Colby, owner of Brick Tower Press, who has a home on the Island, to organize the new volume.

The book comprises work that started during Mr. Clancy’s days as a night cab driver in Manhattan, which became the subject of “The Night Line.” “My Life in Pieces” includes his work as freelance journalist in Belfast; as a novelist inhaling the beauty of the Irish countryside; and a sharp-eyed and -edged reporter of the Long Island political scene.

Read it from start to finish, or page through and pause to read his feature on visiting Florence, Italy, years before Stanley Tucci taught us how to eat and pronounce stracciatella; dodging Vespas, sipping espresso at a cafe and using words, his own artistic tools, to praise the brilliance of Michelangelo’s David, who he introduces as the “big naked white guy,” and goes on to say: “About 18 feet high, David is the great cliche, the most famous statue in the world. But standing before it in its own skylighted gallery, you’ll be overwhelmed at the scale of the thing, the nakedness, the drama in the stone, that here is David before battling Goliath. Made when Michelangelo was all of 29, David is young, the killer before the killing, but his stance and expression tell you he is far from innocent. Seeing it in the flesh (and the enduring and seductive mystery of classical and Renaissance sculpture is that marble has become naked flesh) allows one of Italy’s gifts, Humanism — the belief that the divine is within us — to shine.”

As if that were not enough to tempt a reader’s palate, the Foreword to the book is delivered by the Island’s favorite resident curmudgeon, Robert Lipsyte, who delivers his own Reporter columns in the voice of the Codger.

Mr. Lipsyte sports an impressive bibliography of his own, from award-winning sports coverage at The New York Times to the author of 24 books. He delivers this take on the man he’s come to know well as an editor and a friend:

“He looks deceptively friendly, a compact man whose faint smile seems to offer a lack of judgment. While listening, he will be absolutely still, without affect, to allow a scene to develop to his liking  … when the subject needs to be nudged along, even be it other tricky writers such as ‘The Ginger Man’s’ J.P. Donleavy, ‘L.A. Confidential’s’ James Ellroy, or the late, great critic John Leonard … Clancy can uncoil a sentence like a silken rope, snap it like a whip, tie up a complicated thought. He can write long, he can write short, he can build a case, he can murmur a spooky tale.”

“The hardest part was all the massive re-organization,” said the man who choreographs the contributors of columns, cartoons, photographs, features and news stories to produce a weekly paper. “It’s like asking someone who their favorite child is,” Mr. Clancy added, about deciding which pieces to keep and what to leave out.

Back in his days as a freelancer in Ireland, he wrote and William Morrow published “Blind Pilot,” which will soon be re-released in paperback. “A chillingly, well-informed thriller about Irish terrorism,” was the appraisal in a New York Times Review, and The Baltimore Sun noted: “One would have to look to the best novels of John le Carré and Graham Greene to find works that can be read with such pleasure as thrillers and such resonation as literature.”

The novel is set in the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a bloody, wrenching, seemingly endless war that Mr. Clancy saw up close and described in some of the most gripping passages of “My Life in Pieces.”

Looking back on that time now, he says, “Thank God it’s over. At the time, we thought it was never going to end. It was so entrenched, everybody has family, friends who have died for it.”

He said a friend, Niall Kiely, a journalist with the Irish Times, disagreed: “He said generations to come would be sickened by it, and it eventually would end. ” And in time, Mr. Kiely would be proven more right than wrong, as an extended if fragile era of peace would continue to this day.

“My Life in Pieces: Writers, Rogues, The Road and The Rock” is available from Barnes and Noble and Amazon, or from your local book store. All formats available from Brick Tower Press — hardcover, trade paperback, audio book and digital edition. “Blind Pilot” will be released shortly.