Thomas D'Arcy McGee: Passion, Reason, and Politics, 1825-1857, the first volume in a two-part biography, explores the development of those principles in Ireland and the United States. From his early temperance speeches in Wexford, Ireland, David Wilson follows McGee across the Atlantic, where at nineteen he became the editor of America's leading Irish newspaper, and traces his subsequent involvement with the Young Ireland movement, his reactions to the Famine, and his role in the Rising of 1848.