Tom O'Shea, a 20th Century Man

Tom O'Shea may have started out life as an orphan with no prospects, but in his final days he looked back on a life of love, family, and personal achievement that any man would be proud to call his own. A moving memoir of a daughter discovering her beloved father's story, "Tom O'Shea: A 20th Century Man," commemorates a life well lived, and it sheds light on one Irish Catholic family's experience of American life during the mid-twentieth century.

After her father's death in 2001, Marian O'Shea Wernicke began to realize that much of his early life was a mystery. Through conversations with her mother and research of the time, she pieced together what his early years had been like and soon recognized she wasn't just crafting a family history. Suddenly the life of Tom O'Shea was expanding, and as all good stories are, her father's was a universally poignant tale that speaks beyond the confines of one man or one family.

Experience life as an orphan, an Irish-American, and a US Marine in the Pacific during WWII through this intriguing story of a man who, though abandoned as a child, ended his days a happy husband, father, and grandfather.