In Against the Grain, Timothy Bohen tells the story of the Irish First Ward’s beginning and of the colorful characters that forged that beginning. The newly arrived famine immigrants settled in the Old First Ward more out of prejudice than choice…. Reading this book, one thinks of Mark Goldman’s High Hopes: the Rise and Decline of Buffalo, New York and George Reedy’s From the Ward to the White House. Against the Grain is history told in its best and most lively prose—the story of who did what, where, to whom and why is played out on the windswept streets in the city’s first waterfront neighborhood. Timothy Bohen tells the story of this place, its people and of the daily struggles; he’s brought our past to life. Steeped in the shadows of concrete industry and wood frame homes, the Old First Ward was a way of life and a state of mind, a place of dreams lost and found. Against the Grain is a gift from a grateful descendant of that place, a grateful descendant in search of his story and of ours. Bravo!”
— Brian Higgins, U.S. Congressman