Here is a nice piece on the author:

http://www.jerseycityindependent.com/ ... rfront-with-james-fisher/





James Fisher is the kind of history professor you wish you had. Sure, he looks the part, round glasses and floppy hair, but what most recommends him is his energy. Not energy as in some kind of new age-y good aura, but literally his enthusiasm and passion for his subject, whether that be history, theology or the subject of his latest book ? wherein all his other interests seem to merge ? the Port of New York.

As a New Jersey native, the often-untold stories of the mostly Irish waterfront workers on both sides of the Hudson River are a source of endless fascination to Fisher, and, whether talking to him about it, or reading his book, his excitement about the subject is contagious.

On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York, Fisher?s fourth book, was published last year by Cornell University Press and is the result of over ten years of research, interviews and writing begun when Fisher and his wife lived in the Midwest and completed after they moved, with their son, back to New Jersey...

Books: 'On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York'

By Terry Golway
By Star-Ledger Staff
December 26, 2009

'On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York'
James T. Fisher -- Cornell University Press, 370 pp., $29.95

If you?re a fan of the classic film ?On the Waterfront,? you probably believe its depiction of violence and redemption is a West Side story ? as in the west side of Manhattan.

But as James T. Fisher points out in this new study of the life on the piers and on the movie sets, the full story of the waterfront is very much a New Jersey tale.

The piers of Jersey City provided Mayor Frank Hague with a source of patronage and enrichment for decades, while the film itself was shot on location in Hoboken ? not, as many would suspect, in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, the heart of New York?s old waterfront culture.

Fisher, a Cranford resident and a professor of theology and American studies at Fordham University, spent more than a decade studying the struggle for power on both sides of the Hudson River in the 1940s and the film version of that titanic clash involving Irish-American clergy, business leaders, union activists and rank-and-file longshoremen.

As Fisher makes clear, Irish Catholics dominated the waterfront in the bad old days ? the name of Marlon Brando?s character in the film, remember, was Terry Malloy. But it was a Jewish writer named Budd Schulberg who captured the story?s power and drama, and brought it to the screen.

Fisher brilliantly chronicles the relationship between Schulberg and a crusading Jesuit priest named John (Pete) Corridan, who was the inspiration for the character Karl Malden played in the film. Corridan was associated with a Jesuit-sponsored labor school in Chelsea (there was one in Jersey City, as well), and he and his colleagues openly agitated against corruption throughout the port. Corridan and Schulberg provide the soul of this riveting account of the waterfront before condos, play piers and river taxis.

Terry Golway teaches U.S. history at Kean University in Union.