Justice Daniel Cohalan—New York-born judge, politician, and prominent figure in the Irish American community—was a major personality in transatlantic Irish nationalist circles during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose influence was wide. Michael Doorley examines his place in those circles in a biography that reveals much not only about the man but also about the complex political world within which he operated. Justice Daniel Cohalan is an exploration of an influential political and cultural leader in the Irish American community, the forces that shaped him, and the Irish and American contexts of his actions and ideology.

Today, Cohalan is remembered primarily for his conflict with Sinn Féin leader Éamon de Valera, who visited the United States from Ireland in 1919–20 to solicit monetary support for and recognition of an Irish nation. During that visit, Cohalan and de Valera came into a conflict over their different approaches to and visions for the Irish nationalist movement. While many have explained this conflict primarily as a power struggle between the two men, Doorley argues that their differences arose from Cohalan's distinctively American perspective on the Irish nationalist movement, which conflicted with de Valera's desire to focus exclusively on Ireland. Cohalan was concerned not only with Irish independence but also with the position of Irish Americans in the United States, and this molded his views about how funds should be raised in the United States for Ireland and the details of how the relationship between Ireland and Great Britain should be defined. Doorley's book does justice to this skirmish, which takes a prominent place in the narrative, but his real purpose is to expand our understanding of Cohalan's wider role in both transatlantic Irish nationalist circles and in American politics in a look at his entire life's work and the influences upon it. Central to that understanding are the same forces that Doorley highlights in the affair with de Valera—those associated with Cohalan's Irish American identity.

Doorley's biography of Cohalan is framed within a traditional birth to death chronology, but the contents within are mostly focused on Cohalan's political life and on the ways in which both his sense of Irishness and his identity as an American citizen and political leader framed his actions and opinions. Throughout the book, Doorley returns to three main themes: Cohalan's influence in promoting Irish nationalism in the United States; his desire to lift up the position of Irish Americans in the United States and counter the conception of the American nation as essentially Anglo-Saxon; and his wish to detach the United States from its connection to Great Britain, and thus its association with British imperialism, in foreign affairs. In elucidating these themes, Doorley explores Cohalan's role in Clan na Gael and the effort to solicit German assistance for an independent Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century. He illuminates Cohalan's guiding influence within the Friends of Irish Freedom, founded among Irish Americans to provides monetary and moral support for the Irish nationalist movement. Doorley also analyzes his conflict with de Valera and the split among Irish Americans that occurred after de Valera's visit; discusses Cohalan's criticisms of the Irish Free State; and considers Cohalan's isolationism following World War I as an expression of his opposition to an Anglo-American coalition. As he engages with all of these issues, Doorley explores how Cohalan's involvement in American law and politics both gave him an entry into furthering an Irish nationalist agenda in the United States and helped to shape his conception of how that agenda might be achieved. The book thus sheds light not only on Cohalan's importance as an Irish American leader but also as an American politician. Doorley investigates his connection to Tammany Hall and influence in larger spheres of American politics as he served on the New York Supreme Court and became a spokesman for Irish American interests in national affairs.

In the biography of Cohalan, Doorley seeks to reveal not only the essentials of Cohalan's political life and illuminate the importance of a neglected historical figure; he also strives to place his life in a larger historical context. Through the dilemmas and decisions Cohalan faced, the reader gains a sense of the challenges Irish Americans faced during the era that Cohalan was politically active. The book is a solidly researched biography, drawing from archival source material in both the United States and Ireland and situated clearly within the larger historiography of Irish American history. Readers interested in the transatlantic debates about an Irish nation, the complicated dynamics of the Irish nationalist movement, the challenges Irish Americans faced in gaining acceptance in the United States in the early twentieth century, the way that tensions between Irish and American interests complicated Irish American positions on war and foreign policy, or simply in the life of a powerful Irish American leader will find value in this well-written and well-argued book.