Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 315
The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) by John Mitchell
Paperback; 18.00 Euro / 24.50 USD / 13.00 UK; 220 pages
Mitchel's account of the Repeal campaign, the Famine and the 1848 Rising, which originally appeared in Mitchel's Tennessee-based newspaper, The Southern Citizen, in 1858. Mitchel was a significant and controversial figure. Last Conquest, originally written as a riposte to American Nativist hostility to Famine immigrants, is well known in Famine debates for its claim that the Famine was a deliberate act of genocide by the British government. New in the Classics of Irish History series.
My Struggle for Life by Joseph Keating
Paperback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 18.00 UK; 306 pages [Add To Basket]
This eloquent memoir provides an unrivalled insight into the life of a child reared in a working-class Irish Catholic community in late nineteenth-century Britain. No other author succeeds in depicting so vividly the texture of a life delimited by manual work, home and community ties as experienced by Irish migrants of the period. At the same time, it charts the tortuous route by which a young man struggled to free himself from a life of manual labour by using his literary talents to become a journalist and a popular novelist. Published in 1916, it reflects the world and assumptions of an emigre community between the failure of the Fenian movement and the Easter Rising, and it includes a telling vignette of the aged Fenian Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. An insightful picture of the world of those Home Rule supporters who lived outside Ireland emerges from this book. New in the Classics of Irish History series.
Your Fondest Annie by Annie O’Donnell
Paperback: 18.00 Euro / 24.50 USD / 13.00 UK; 154 pages
Annie O'Donnell left her native Galway for America in 1898, one of 15,175 Irish women who left that year; they far outnumbered the men, and most of them went into domestic service. She became friends with Jim Phelan on the ship to Philadelphia. He was a 22-year-old farmer from Co. Kilkenny who had run away from home during Sunday mass to join his uncle, a tilesetter in Indianapolis. Annie went to work as a children's nurse for the W. L. Mellon family of Pittsburgh. Her letters to Jim Phelan, published here for the first time, are a unique contribution to the growing literature on women's emigration: they provide a sustained three-year narrative of her life as a children's nurse. Annie O'Donnell had been well educated in Ireland and her letters are lively and enjoyable to read. Maureen Murphy has provided an introduction and notes to the letters. Annie O'Donnell (1880-1959) was born in Lippa, near Spiddal, Co. Galway. She emigrated to America in 1898, remaining there and marrying James P. Phelan. She lived in Pittsburgh until her death. New in the Classics of Irish History series.
Irish Art of Controversy by Lucy McDiarmid
Trade Paperback; 20.0 0Euro / 26.00 USD / 14.00 UK; 278 pages [Add To Basket]
Controversy offers high drama: in it people speak lines as colourful and passionate as any heard on stage. While the Irish are no more combative than any other race, language and debate have always been central to the public narrative of their lives, offering individuals a vicarious involvement in a collective destiny. In the years before the 1916 Rising, controversy in Ireland was 'popular', wrote George Moore, especially 'when accompanied with the breaking of chairs'. The witty and illuminating book offers accounts of five cultural controversies of the twentieth century: the 39 Hugh Lane paintings contested by Dublin and London; Father O'Hickey's fight for the Irish language; Lady Gregory and Bernard Shaw's defence of the Abbey Theatre against Dublin Castle; the 1913 'Save the Dublin Kiddies' campaign, and the long-running debate about Roger Casement's diaries. In its original treatment of the rich material Yeats called 'intemperate speech', reflected in private letters, archival sources, cartoons, ballads and editorials, The Irish Art of Controversy suggests new ways of thinking about modern Ireland and shows how contention functioned centrally in the construction of Irish national identity.
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry: Return Journeys to Ireland by Annie Caulfield
Hardback; 20.00 Euro / 26.00 USD / 14.00 UK; 285 pages
Annie Caulfield's early years were spent by the seaside in Ireland. However, the family shifted to Sixties London and soon she wasn't sure who she was - was she English, was she Irish, and if so, what kind of Irish? Watching the news of The Troubles, she was unable to recognise the country she'd left behind. On return journeys to visit her family over the last thirty years, she discovers how much The Troubles have caused weird and successful aspects of the country's life and history to be overlooked. Caulfield's background is religiously and politically mixed, giving her a unique and often astute perspective on The Troubles. This is an Irish emigrant's tale, asking whether you can ever really go back to your roots. If you were a punk rocker when others were on hunger strike, can you really put your hand on your heart and say my people'? If you get a headache and go home to watch Big Brother on 12th July, are you just too flippant to understand your own country? There are many books on the recent history of Northern Ireland, but none give such a funny insight into the lives of ordinary people as Annie Caulfield's affectionate portrait of Alternative Ulster'.
Welcome to Hell: One Irishman’s Fight for Life Inside the Bangkok Hilton by Colin Martin
Trade Paperback; 11.00 Euro / 14.50 USD / 7.50 UK; 231 pages, with black-and-white photo insert
Written from his cell and smuggled out page by page, Colin Martin’s autobiography chronicles an innocent man’s struggle to survive inside one of the world’s most dangerous prisons. This book is not for the faint hearted; Welcome to Hell takes you behind the bars of the Bandkok Hilton. After being swindled out of a fortune, Colin was let down by the hopelessly corrupt Thai police. Forced to rely upon his own resources, he tracked down the man who conned him and, drawn into a fight, accidentally stabbed and killed that man’s bodyguard. Colin was arrested, denied a fair trial, convicted of murder and thrown into prison – where he remained for 8 years. Honest and often disturbing – but told with a surprising humour – Welcome to Hell is the remarkable story of how Colin was denied justice again and again. In his extraordinary account he describes the swindle, his arrest and vicious torture by police, the unfair trial, and the 8 years of brutality and squalor he was forced to endure.
UDA: Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror by Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack
Paperback; 10.00 Euro / 13.00 USD / 7.00 UK; 435 pages, with black-and-white photo insert [Add To Basket]
A history of sectarian slaughter, bloody feuding and gangsterism has made the Ulster Defence Association infamous. In UDA, two distinguished journalists, Jim Cusack and Henry McDonald, tell the story of how a popular mass movement broke into rival criminal factions. They chronicle the UDA's most notorious killers and brutal murders; reveal its murky relationship with the British and Unionist establishment; and, using exclusive insider accounts, trace the rise and fall of C Company the west Belfast division that evolved into a killing machine under the leadership of Johnny Adair. Cusack and McDonald tell how the cult of personality, the lure of easy money and bitter rivalries succeeded in doing what thirty years of republican violence failed to tearing the heart of loyalism apart.
The Dublin Review Number 19 Summer 2005 edited by Brendan Barrington
Paperback; 7.50 Euro / 10.00 USD / 5.00 UK, 110 pages [Add To Basket]
This issue contains: Selina Guinness on the Future of Farming; ‘Lost Time Accidents’: Brian Dillon in Dungeness; Ann Marie Hourihane visits Knock; Church and State in El Salvador by Maurice Walsh; Civil War Secrets by Noel Duffy; Conor O’Callaghan: ‘Hands’; Stories by Kevin Barry and Clare Wigfall
The Dublin Review Number 18 Spring 2005 edited by Brendan Barrington
Paperback; 7.50 Euro / 10.00 USD / 5..00 UK; 110 pages [Add To Basket]
This issue contains: Two Visits to Kosovo by Molly McCloskey; Solus Rex: Fiction by Patrick Fitzgerald; Shylock’s Lament by Harry Clifton; ‘Foreignism’: A Philadelphia Diary by Vona Groarke; House of Hutchinson, House of Murphy by Rosita Boland; Barcelona, 1975 by Colm Toibin; How to eat a fir-tree and keep yr lips moist: fiction by Tom Mac Intyre; Labyrinth of the revolution by Justin Quinn.
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