Why did I find this memoir of an Irish boyhood so especially affecting? Replaying Hugh Leonard's "Home Before Night" in my mind, I can think of a dozen things about it that touched me in one way or another. But they seem somehow threadbare in the retelling…. Mr. Leonard has a typically Irish gift for metaphor, as well as the familiar Irish abundance of charming and eccentric relatives….

[Surely] the love between Jack and his ma and da is irresistible—the love that was sometimes "turned upside down" but was love "for all that." Surely the episode in which Jack's da is ordered by the police to drown his son's dog (he fails) is reason enough for admiring "Home Before Night." Yes, it is beautifully written, especially the storm at the incident's climax. But any summary of it is bound to seem sentimental, just as many other incidents...