The scope of Tim Pat Coogan's latest book "Wherever Green Is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora" is like nothing he's ever done before - and perhaps like nothing ever done in Irish history. The esteemed journalist spent the last five years traveling the world, from Japan to Latin America, from Africa to the U.S.

He was in search of Irish fingerprints - that is, the impact the Irish have had not just in one country, but around the world.

"Some 70 million people on the globe are entitled to call themselves Irish - a remarkable statistic when one considers that there are only five million people on the island of Ireland itself," Coogan writes in his introduction.

Flashing his trademark wit, Coogan adds: "And of these (five million Irish) at least 800,000 living in North-Eastern Ireland say they are not Irish at all and describe themselves as British!"

As Coogan's 700-plus page book makes clear, those Protestants in the North are quite the exception.

($35 / 746 pages

/ St. Martin's Press

)