Read Ireland Book News - Issue 23
<-- [Back To Main Menu] 1. PI in the Sky: A Revelation of the Ancient Celtic Wisdom by Michael Poynder (paperback; 14.95 Irish pounds / 22.45 US Dollars approximately) [Add To Basket]
Our distant ancestors knew the flow of energy from the sun is the life force, and that sunspot activity, planetary influence, the earth's electromagnetism and the wave-energy properties of light all influence human life. Using the ancient 'diviner's' art, Stone Age cultures set up their megaliths at the intersections of the energy paths flowing around our planet. Their sacred sites modelled and put to work the geometry of the solar system, creating extraordinarily powerful concentrations of the vital force.
With the warlike Iron Age culture, and a narrowing of human perception, this higher knowledge was eroded. But the ancient wisdom tradition remains, depicted and enshrined in the carved spirals at Newgrange, the alignments at Carnac, the inbuilt mathematics of the Pyramids, the geometry of the Tara Brooch and countless other sites and artefacts.
Michael Poynder has devoted half a lifetime to the painstaking study of this long lost tradition - a quest begun at Carrowkeel, on the shores of Lough Arrow in County Sligo in 1962. Lavishly illustrated and written with great clarity and insight, this book is the magnificent result. Here the author delves into the mysteries of mathematics, cosmology, physics and archaeology to reveal a wealth of ancient knowledge of astonishing sophistication.
2. Room for a Single Lady by Clare Boylan (hardback; 18.70 IRP / 28.00 USD) [Add To Basket] Evoking the magic of childhood and adolescence with rare subtlety, wit and warmth, this novel is both delightfully comic and genuinely moving, and shows the author to be at the height of her considerable powers.
'Reality is immemorial to men." So says dazzling Sissy Sullivan as she pushes her rubber bosoms into her bra. And for ten-year-old Rose Rafferty there is at last a marker on her map of the earth.
To Eugene Rafferty, girls are like money - they have to be saved. His three young daughters, despite living in 1950s Dublin, seem doomed to a childhood of Victorian austerity until a stranger comes to their house, trailing the allure of the world. Bridie, Kitty and Rose are growing up and they no longer trust their beautiful but oppressed mother to lead them into brilliant womanhood. As family fortunes decline, the Raffertys are forced to take in lodgers, and these independent but eccentric outsiders introduce the girls to new experiences - of sex and superstition, of spite, of true love, and tragedy. For in a world caught between the after-shock of the war and the transforming liberalism of the 1960s, there are two states of womanhood: single, and caught up in the comic and desperate search for a suitable husband; or married, and enduring the claustrophobia of suburban life.
3. Ballyknockan: A Wicklow Stonecutters' Village by Seamas O Maitiu and Barry O'Reilly (paperback; 9.99 IRP / 15.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
For over 170 years a community of stonecutters in Ballyknockan, nestling in the Wicklow mountains, has provided granite for many of Dublin's best known buildings, including churches, public offices, hospitals and banks.
This lavishly illustrated work outlines the history of these skilled craftsmen and their tradition. It examines their unique village and highlights examples of their craft in Dublin and elsewhere.
4. Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections of the Legacy of the Famine edited by Tom Hayden (hardback; 16.99 IRP / 25.50 USD) [Add To Basket] Why do Irish people still find it so difficult to confront the Famine? In the words of the poet Eavan Boland, the Famine was covered 'in a silence in which stories were not told, in which memories were not handed on, in which the ordinary sorrow and devastation of a people was neither named nor recorded.' What is the exact nature of this unspoken trauma at the heart of Irish history? How has it touched our own lives, altered our individual histories? What can we recover of the Famine when so few records were kept? And how can we commemorate the dead when we don't even remember their names?
The Irish Famine or Great Hunger - which saw its darkest point 150 years ago during 'Black 47' - killed or displaced millions of people, utterly transforming Irish society. Within a generation, the population of the country had been halved, the Irish language effectively destroyed and the cultural fabric of Ireland lay shattered.
This book is a unique collection of highly personal essays, reflections and poems from Irish and Irish American contributors. Contributors include: Seamus Heaney, John Waters, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Seamus Deane, Eavan Boland, Tim Pat Coogan, Nell McCafferty, Paul Durcan, Brendan Kennelly, Helen Litton, Jimmy Breslin, Gabriel Byrne, James Carroll. Complemented by a historical chronology, and a series of eyewitness accounts and commentaries from contemporary documents - newspapers, letters and diaries - this book urges the reader to heal 'a wound on the Irish psyche that still aches.'
5. The Dramatic Life and Fascinating Times of Oscar Wilde by Martin Fido (hardback; 14.30 IRP / 21.40 USD) [Add To Basket]
The story of Oscar Wilde, brilliant Irishman and one of the most arresting personalities of his time, is inseparable from the world of arts and high society in the eighties and nineties and this book deals with both. Wilde was the centre of a brilliant group at Trinity College, Dublin which included Edward Carson - later his prosecutor - and his arrival at Oxford immediately brought him into contact with Ruskin, Pater and Newman. He won the Newdigate Prize in 1878 and from that moment went from success to success until the fatal enmity of the Marquess of Queensberry resulted in his ruin.
Oscar Wilde is appreciated today as never before; the author of the marvellous comedies, of Dorian Gray, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, has a reputation that no longer suffers from a world bent on striking the moral attitudes of a hypocritical society.
The world of Oscar Wilde was the world of Swinburne, Verlaine, Whistler, Frank Harris, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Toulouse-Lautrec, Sarah Bernardt: it was also a world of enormous wealth and privilege which existed beside one of grinding poverty and squalid vice.
A wealth of illustrations illuminate the many facets of the world of Oscar Wilde portrayed in this magnificent book.
6. I Could Read the Sky by Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke (hardback; 16.55 IRP / 24.80 USD) [Add To Basket]
This book is a collaboration, in the shape of a lyrical novel, between writer Timothy O'Grady and photographer Steve Pyke. It tells the story of a man coming of age in the middle years of this century. Now at its end, he finds himself alone, struggling to make sense of a life of dislocation and loss. He remembers his childhood in the west of Ireland and his decades of bewildered exile in the factories, potato fields and on the building sites of England. He is haunted by the faces of the family he left behind, and by the land that is still within him. He remembers the country and the sea-scapes, the bars and the boxing booths, the music he played and the women he loved.
The threnody of his days is also a succession of pictures and in their counterpoint - vivid, sensuous text and stark, harrowing, sometimes lovely images - this novel becomes a distillation of the experience of Irish emigration.
Best-sellers List
Paperback Fiction ------------------------------------------------- 1. Woman to Woman Cathy Kelly 2. Bridget Jones's Diary Helen Fielding 3. Story of the Night Colm Toibin 4. Evening Class Maeve Binchy 5. Promises, Promises Patricia Scanlan Paperback Non-Fiction ------------------------------------------------- 1. Angela's Ashes Frank McCourt 2. Little Book of CalmPaul Wilson 3. Fallen Idol: Haughey T. Ryle Dwyer 4. Teenage Year Colm Keane 5. Beyond Belief Liam Fay Hardback Fiction ------------------------------------------------- 1. 10lb. Penalty Dick Francis 2. Scalpel Paul Carson 3. Women with Men Richard Ford 4. Four Letters of Love Niall Williams 5. Deception on his Mind Elizabeth George Hardback Non-Fiction ------------------------------------------------- 1. Mary Robinson Lorna Siggins 2. Anam Cara John O'Donoghue 3. Diana: A Tribute Tim Graham 4. Atlas Irish Rural Landscape F.H.A. Aalen 5. Irish Stone Walls Patrick McAfee Children's ------------------------------------------------- 1. Irish Legends for Children Yvonne Carroll 2. Goosebumps 43 R.L. Stine 3. Fields of Home Marita Conlon-McKenna 4. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry Mildred Taylor 5. Goosebumps 44 R.L. Stine
<-- [Back To Main Menu]