Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 320
Sinn Fein: A Century of Struggle introduced by Gerry Adams
Large Format Paperback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 250 pages, with black-and-white illustrations throughout
This book marks the centenary of Sinn Féin. Just published it is a unique record of 100 years of struggle. This book tells the story of the Sinn Féin century in the words of Republicans themselves over the ten decades since the organisation was established. Lavishly illustrated, the book is one of the centrepieces of Sinn Féin’s centenary programme.
Introduced by Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, the book traces the political history of Ireland from 1905 to 2005. It moves from the founding of Sinn Féin to the 1916 Easter Rising, the Black and Tan War, the Partition of Ireland and the Civil War. It speaks with the voice of Republicans in the subsequent years of what James Connolly rightly predicted would be the ‘Carnival of Reaction’ North and South. It gives an insight in the Border Campaign of the 1950s.
It records the struggle of Republicans through the Civil Rights Movement, the collapse of Unionist one-party rule, internment, Bloody Sunday and the long and tragic war. It reflects popular resistance to British rule, the heroism of prisoners, culminating in the hunger strikes, and the emergence of Sinn Féin as a strong all-Ireland political party - despite all the efforts of its opponents. Finally it brings us to the peace process and looks forward to the Ireland of Equals now being built by Sinn Féin.
Baptised in Blood: The Formation of the Cork Brigade of the Irish Volunteers 1913-1916 by Gerry White and Brendan O’Shea
Large Format Paperback; 15.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 128 pages, with photos and illustrations throughout [Add To Basket]
The euphoria that surrounded the formation of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin in 1913 captured the imagination of the country and a series of similar meetings were organised for other locations throughout Ireland. In Cork a public meeting took place in City Hall on Sunday evening, 14 December 1913. After a very contentious meeting over 500 men enlisted in the new organisation and were constituted as 'The Cork City Corps' of the Irish Volunteers. The fragile unity achieved within the ranks of this countrywide Volunteer movement was shattered by the outbreak of the First World War. Thousands of their number set off to serve with great distinction in the tenth and sixteenth divisions of the British army. The more militant minority, of whom initially there remained only 12,000, refused to follow suit, and dominated by the IRB, they retained the title of 'Irish Volunteers' (Oglaig na hEireann), and set about the daunting task of rebuilding an entire organisation.
Ireland and the European Union: Nice, Enlargement and the Future of Europe edited by Michael Holmes
Large Format Paperback; 22.00 Euro / 28.00 USD / 15.00 UK; 206 pages
This book analyses Ireland's relationship with the European Union in the wake of Ireland's shock "No" vote to the Treaty of Nice and the major changes in the EU since enlargement; It is the first book to examine the "No" vote in detail, and to look at Ireland's engagement with the issues of enlargement and the negotiation of the draft constitution; Leading academics from Ireland and the UK have combined to provide a thought-provoking book which will be invaluable to anyone interested in contemporary Irish politics and economics, particularly for those interested in the issues of enlargement, the debate about the future of Europe and the relationship between the Union and its member states; It is the first book to analyse the Nice referendums in detail, with chapters exploring opposition to European integration in Ireland and the patterns of public opinion on integration; The book provides an overall assessment of the relationship between Ireland and the European Union
House of Memories by Alice Taylor
Large Format Paperback; 15.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 280 pages [Add To Basket]
A novel of rural Ireland in the early 1960s, continuing the story of two neighbouring farms and their feuding families begun in Alice Taylor's earlier works. Following his brutish father's unlamented death, young Danny Conway strives to rescue the family farm from ruin, finding help in an unexpected source. Other challenges face the local community, which already has little to offer young people and now it finds that it is threatened with the loss of its school.
The new novel from the bestselling author of The Woman of the House A story of love for the land and of the passions and jealousies it can inspire. A moving story, too, of bereavement and grief. No one knows the warp and weft of country life as Alice Taylor does, and she has a unique ability to capture its rhythms and cadences. Following his brutish father's unlamented death, young Danny Conway strives to rescue the family farm from ruin; when all seems hopeless, help comes from the most unexpected quarter.
Booking Passage: We Irish & Americans by Thomas Lynch
Hardback; 19.00 Euro / 24.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 300 pages
In February of 1970, Thomas Lynch, aged twenty-one, bought a one-way ticket to Ireland. He landed in the townland of Moveen, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the thatched cottage that his great-grandfather - another Thomas Lynch - had left late in the nineteenth century with a one-way ticket to America. Tommy and Nora Lynch, his elderly, unmarried, distant cousins welcomed the young American 'home'. In the words of the author, 'it changed my life'. He inherited the 'home place' when Nora died in 1992. In the three decades since that first landing and in dozens of return trips to Moveen, Lynch learned to look for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish; to find, as Montaigne wrote, 'the whole of Man's estate' in every man. Lynch's poems and essays, widely published around the world, have made known the debt he owes to Ireland and the Irish. Booking Passage is part travelogue, part cultural study, part memoir and elegy, part guidebook for what Lynch calls 'fellow pilgrims' working their way through their own and the larger histories.
County Donegal Railways Companion by Roger Crombleholme
Large Format Paperback; 23.00 Euro / 29.00 USD / 16.00 UK; 112 pages, with black-and-white illustrations throughout
An illustrated history with scale drawings of locomotives, railcars and wagons featured on one of Irelands most popular narrow gauge railways. A book for the railway modeller and railway historian alike.
Michael Collins: A Biography by Tim Pat Coogan
Paperback; 20.00 Euro / 26.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 510 pages, with black-and-white photo insert [Add To Basket]
When the Irish nationalist Michael Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, he observed to Lord Birkenhead that he may have signed his own death warrant. In August 1922 that prophecy came true when Collins was ambushed, shot and killed by a compatriot, but his vision and legacy lived on. This biography presents the life of a man whose idealistic vigour and determination were matched by his political realism and organizational abilities. The author's previous books include "Ireland Since the Rising", "On the Blanket" and "The IRA".
The Day Michael Collins was Shot by Meda Ryan
Paperback; 10.00 Euro / 13.00 USD / 7.00 UK; 215 pages [Add To Basket]
Solves the mystery surrounding the ambush and killing of Michael Collins. The author Meda Ryan drawing on eye-witness accounts never before published, painstakingly reconstructs, in minute-by-minute detail, the last four days of Michael Collins's life and follows, mile by mile, his fatal journey through his home county of Cork.
Concise History of Ireland by Sean Duffy
Large Format Paperback; 17.00 Euro / 22.50 USD / 12.00 UK; 250 pages, with full colour photos, maps and illustrations throughout [Add To Basket]
This attractive one-volume survey tells the story of Ireland from earliest times to the present. The text is complemented by 200 illustrations, including maps, photographs and diagrams. Sean Duffy, the general editor of the bestselling Atlas of Irish History , has written a text of exceptional clarity. Duffy stresses the enduring themes of his story: the long cultural continuity; the central importance of Ireland's relationships with Britain and mainland Europe; and the intractability of the ethnic and national divisions in modern Ulster. As a specialist in medieval Irish history, he gives the earlier period its due treatment - unlike most such surveys - thus introducing these recurring themes at an early stage.
Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy: An Irish Writer in New York by Angela Bourke
Paperback; 10.00 Euro / 13.00 USD / 7.00 UK; 330 pages [Add To Basket]
The first book about Maeve Brennan, the recently rediscovered New Yorker writer from Ireland, who wrote like an angel, and looked like a fashion model, but became homeless in Manhattan in the 1970s and died forgotten in 1993. Born in Dublin in 1917 to politically active parents, Maeve Brennan's childhood in Ireland was moulded by the cultural ideologies of nationalism and lit by the creative energy of the Abbey and Gate theatres. She was seventeen when her father was appointed to the Irish Legation in Washington DC, where he was Irish Minister throughout World War II. Maeve wrote fashion copy at Harper's Bazaar until 1949, when William Shawn invited her to join The New Yorker. Tiny, impeccably groomed, and devastatingly witty, in William Maxwell's words, 'to be around her was to see style being invented'. Her richly textured fiction criticism and 'Talk of the Town' pieces, published in the 1950s and '60s, during The New Yorker's most influential period, offer unsparing portraits of the Ireland she had left and the America she inhabited. As this richly researched and wide-ranging book makes clear, Maeve Brennan's effect on the people who met her, her eye for human behaviour, clothing and domestic settings, her memory of home and her courageous life as a woman alone in metropolitan America make her an icon of the twentieth century.
Gregory Carr, Bookseller
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