From the National Book Award&;winning and best-selling author Timothy Egan comes the epic story of one of the most fascinating and colorful Irishman in nineteenth-century America.   The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York &; the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.  Meagher&;s rebirth in America included his leading the newly formed Irish Brigade from New York in many of the fiercest battles of the Civil War &; Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg. Twice shot from his horse while leading charges, left for dead in the Virginia mud, Meagher&;s dream was that Irish-American troops, seasoned by war, would return to Ireland and liberate their homeland from British rule.   The hero's last chapter, as territorial governor of Montana, was a romantic quest for a true home in the far frontier. His death has long been a mystery to which Egan brings haunting, colorful new evidence.