Read Ireland Book Reviews
Issue 356
Dan Breen and the IRA by Joe Ambrose
Paperback; 13 Euro / 17 USD / 9 UK; 222 pages
Dan Breen started the War of Independence. He was the leader of the Third Tipperary Brigade and he sustained 22 bullet wounds evading the British. After the War of Independence, he fought in the Civil War, taking the Republican side when it was obvious that the two sides could not be reconciled. Later, he moved to America where, at the height of prohibition, he ran a speakeasy, or illegal bar. Back in Ireland, he spent several years in Dail Eireann, tried to establish a native film industry and continued to pursue a dream of a thirty-two county Ireland. This is a revised and updated edition of the successful biography, which was first published in 1981.
Hunger Strike: Reflections on the 1981 Hunger Strike edited by Danny Morrison
Trade Paperback; 16 Euro / 20 USD / 11 UK; 270 pages [Add To Basket]
Well-known novelists and poets, former prisoners and activists reflect upon the deaths of the ten republican hunger strikers which proved a turning point in relations between Britain and Ireland. Most of the pieces here were specially commissioned, and while they differ greatly, what they have in common is a sense of the intensity of the experience of the hunger strike at the time, and the intensity of the impression made by it even now, twenty-five years later.
Contributors also include David Beresford, Tom Hayden, John Montague, Roy Greenslade, Eugene McCabe, Ulick O’Connor, Nell McCafferty, Peter Sheridan, Medbh McGuckian, Robert Ballagh, Shane Connaughton, Timothy O’Grady, Christy Moore, There are less familiar names, too: William Brown, an ecumenical Christian; Mary Doyle, a former hunger striker; Sorj Chalandon, a French journalist; Frank Durkan, an American human rights lawyer; Mary Nelis, an activist and mother of two prisoners; Pedram Moallemian, a former Iranian student.
The book is published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ending of the hunger strike.
Dreams of Hope by Lily O’Connor
Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 19 USD / 10 UK; 284 pages
This sparkling memoir is a remarkable personal account of the emigrant lives of one Irish couple amongst the hundreds upon thousands forced to emigrate in the 1950s. The book centres on Lily O’Connor’s married life with Paddy in Dublin, Luton and Geelong, and at its heart is the story of a man who always wanted too much and a woman whose resilience saw her coping courageously, often on her own, with a large family and difficult circumstances. This is a resonant tale of one woman’s life in three countries with a man torn between the contentment of family life and the pursuit of ambition and adventure as a single man. Despite the hard life it evokes with the impact and immediacy of Frank McCourt, Dreams of Hope tells the funny, upbeat story of a feisty, indomitable woman and is full of memorable incident.
Bockety: A Memoir by Desmond Ellis
Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 19 USD / 10 UK; 217 pages [Add To Basket]
This is the sparkling story of a young boy born in 1944 who grew up on the banks of the Grand Canal on Dublin’s Portobello Road, but it is also everyone’s story of the joys and pitfalls of growing up, told with a delightful and infectious humour. Desmond, an awkward boy, romps through his childhood like a bockety* bicycle that won’t quite go where it is steered. His playground is the Grand Canal, where in the company of his more or less bockety friends he goes crashing through the reeds with fishing nets.in search of pinkeens. At home he washes off the inevitable grime of play in a tin tub by the fire, and the toilet is a draughty shed in the yard. If the front door ever did happen to get locked, the key hung down on a string inside where the whole world could reach through the letterbox for it.
Bockety* is a sparkling tale of a time of few cars and many bicycles; of a boy who hid behind the door and listened and tried to make sense of it all while the magnificent mams smoked and talked after polishing the granite doorsteps until they sparkled like silver in the sunlight. In those days, a trip on the crossbar of his dad’s bike as far as Seapoint or Redrock was as good as a journey to Spain today. Gratification was to be had in Cleeve’s toffee and Nancy Balls and gobstoppers. And there was the terrible confusion of girls... It’s a heartwarming story about another world and a time long gone... but not forgotten.
*rickety, unstable, lopsided, crooked
Green Nation: The Irish Environmental Movement from Carnsore Point to the Rossport Five by Liam Leonard
Trade Paperback; 20 Euro / 26 USD / 14 UK; 280 pages
Ireland’s recent social history has been characterised by a series of environmentally based community challenges to multinational plants or infrastructural projects. These community responses are formulated from a populist rural sentiment or localised sense of place, that has been mobilised over the decades in which Ireland has undergone a dramatic transformation from a primarily agrarian and rural society to that of an industrialised economy obsessed by rapid growth and development.
Green Nation: The Irish Environmental Movement from Carnsore Point to the Rossport Five examines a number of the community-based campaigns that have come to make up a grassroots environmental movement in a changing Ireland. Starting with the “No Nukes” protests at Carnsore in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Green Nation traces the emergence a nascent ecopopulist movement that has witnessed a number of campaigns including anti-mining protests at Tynagh, Donegal and Croagh Patrick, anti-toxics activism in Cork, the heritage dispute at Mullaghmore, the campaigns against incineration in Galway, Meath and Cork, the anti-roads protests at the Glen of the Downs, Carrickmines and Tara/Skryne and the ongoing campaign of “Shell to Sea” in Mayo which gave rise to the incredible story of the “Rossport 5”, who were imprisoned for seeking justice for their community in North Mayo. Green Nation examines the mobilisation and framing processes undertaken in these disputes, locating them in the context of a wider rural identity that has shaped grassroots environmentalism in the Irish case.
The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer by Gearoid O Crualaoich
Trade Paperback; 30 Euro / 37 USD / 24 UK; 300 pages
This volume presents an analysis of the "wise woman healer" from the oral traditions of Ireland's rural communities. Stories, told and retold, embedded in the texture of culture and community, collected and studied for many decades, are here translated and made available to the general reader. The figure of the "wise woman", the "hag", the Cailleach, or the "Red Woman" are part of an oral tradition which has its roots in pre-Christian Ireland. In the hands of Gearoid O'Crualaich these figures are subtly explored to reveal how they offered a complex understanding of the world, of human psychology and its predicaments. The thematic structure of the book brings to the fore universal themes such as death, marriage, childbirth and healing, and invites the reader to see the contemporary relevance of the stories for themselves.
Dublinese: Know What I Mean? By Bernard Share
Hardback; 13 Euro / 17 USD / 9 UK; 200 pages [Add To Basket]
The English say that Dubliners speak the best English in the world. Filmmaker Jim Sheridan insists they don't, but that they do speak the most entertaining English. Whether it's naming a piece of public sculpture (The Spike in the Dyke, the Floozie in the Jacuzzi) or commenting on the hardness of life (living on the skin of a rasher), it must be noted that Dubliner's have a flair for waxing lyrical. So, in order to fully appreciate them, it is necessary to learn their language. Through centuries of settlement, conquest and change, the everyday language of Dublin has acquired its own accent, vocabulary and idiom. This study explores Dublinese highlighting the vowel play (kyar for car, muriels for murals), rhyming slang (Wolfe Tone for phone), turns of phrase ('I'll put manners on him!') and all manner of verbal expressions that make up this language. This guided tour refers to historical sources and everyday usage commenting on subjects as varied as colloquial place names ('The Morgue' - The Templeogue Inn), transport (Dart, Doort or Daart?), animals (the dead zoo - the Natural History Museum) and day-to-day living. Literary figures like Joyce, Sheridan, Swift and Roddy Doyle lend their verbal dexterity to the dialogue, as well as Joe and Josephine Soap and their co-citizens. All have enriched the idiom of a city which, to coin a blasphemy, is in essence, the word-made flesh. "Know What I Mean?" includes chapters on: an introduction to Dublinese; everyday usage on the streets; playing with words; effing and blinding and contemporary culture; industry, commerce and a few scoops; and, characters from stage and the street and changes due to Dublin's multi-culturalism.
Party Time: Growing Up in Politics by Johnny Fallon
Paperback; 15 Euro / 18 USD / 11 UK; 222 pages [Add To Basket]
"Growing Up With The Party" follows life through various events such as school, college, looking for work and looking for love, and is set in the context of some of the most dramatic political events in Irelands's history. A down to earth, intriguing look at life in Irish politics for the ordinary person, it examines how politics has shaped the person Fallon is and has influenced the course of his life. It deals with situations that he encountered along the way such as leaving home, the Dublin/Culchie rivalry, the excitement of sporting victories and the importance of local pride. Witty insights show how any family so involved in politics, even at local level, live their lives around that party. It explains tongue in cheek, this love of a political movement, and illustrates the commitment it takes - and of course, why they are willing do it.
Blood of the Isles: Exploring the Genetic Roots of Our Tribal History by Brian Sykes
Trade Paperback; 16 Euro / 21 USD / 11 UK; 306 pages [Add To Basket]
Bryan Sykes, the world's first genetic archaeologist, takes us on a journey around the family tree of Britain and Ireland, to reveal how our tribal history still colours the country today. In 54BC, Julius Caesar launched the first Roman invasion of Britain. His was the first detailed account of the Celtic tribes that inhabited the Isles. But where had they come from and how long had they been there? When the Roman eventually left five hundred years later, they were succeeded by invasions of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. Did these successive invasions obliterate the genetic legacy of the Celts, or have very little effect? After two decades tracing the genetic origins of people from all over the world, Bryan Sykes has now turned the spotlight on his own back yard. In a major research programme, the first of its kind, he and his team at Oxford University set out to test the DNA of over 10,000 volunteers from across Britain and Ireland with the specific aim of answering this very question: what is our modern genetic make-up and what does it tell us of our tribal past? Where are today's Celtic genes? Did Vikings only rape and pillage, or settle with their families? And what of the genetic legacy of the Saxons and the Normans? Are the modern people of the Isles a delicious genetic cocktail? Or did the invaders keep mostly to themselves forming separate genetic layers within the Isles? And where do you fit in? As his findings came in, Bryan Sykes discovered that the genetic evidence revealed often very different stories to the conventional accounts coming from history and archaeology. "Blood of the Isles" reveals the nature of our genetic make-up as never before and what this says about our attitudes to ourselves, each other, and to our past. It is a gripping story that will fascinate and surprise with its conclusions
The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates by Des Ekin
Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 18 USD / 10 UK; 400 pages [Add To Basket]
In June 1631, pirates from Algiers and armed troops of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, stormed ashore at the little harbour village of Baltimore in West Cork. They captured almost all the villagers and bore them away to a life of slavery in North Africa. Some prisoners were destined to live out their days as galley slaves, while others would spend long years in the seclusion of the harem or within the walls of the Sultan's palace. Only two of them ever saw Ireland again. Here is the remarkable tale of a harrowing historical event known as 'The Sack of Baltimore'.
Irish Travellers: Representation and Realities by Michael Hayes
Trade Paperback; 23 Euro / 28 USD / 17 UK; 292 pages [Add To Basket]
The "Traveller question" has been a major source of debate in Irish society for decades, centuries even, and appears no closer to being answered today. For as long as Travellers have roamed the roads of Ireland, they have been subjected to, at best, a sort of mythic, romanticised patronisation, and at worst, vilification and outright hostility - but always as the "other" of Irish ethnic identity. Micheal O hAodha closely examines how images of Travellers have been created and distorted over the centuries, from the nineteenth-century "gipsilorists" to late-twentieth-century anthropological studies. In particular, O hAodha focuses on the 1952 "Tinker Questionnaire", conducted by the Irish Folklore Commission, which remains the most comprehensive account to date of "settled" Irish people's attitudes to Travellers. The author concludes by reflecting on today's complex mixture of equality-driven calls for rights and respect with the largely media-driven stereotype that persists. Where, in all this, does the ever day reality of the Traveller community fit?
Care and Social Change in the Irish Welfare Economy edited by Bryan Fanning and Michael Rush
Trade Paperback; 24 Euro / 29 USD / 18 UK; 270 pages [Add To Basket]
The book's focus is on the implications for Irish social policy of social change including the need to respond to changes resulting from immigration and shifts within the Irish welfare economy that have created new needs for social care. Many of the chapters locate Irish debates about care in a broader social policy context.
In the Dark Room by Brian Dillon
Paperback; 13 Euro / 16 USD / 9 UK; 246 pages [Add To Basket]
Boldly combining the highly personal with the brilliantly scholarly, "In the Dark Room" explores the question of how memory works emotionally and culturally. It is narrated through the prism of the author's experience of losing both his parents, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was on the cusp of adulthood and of trying, after a breakdown some years later, to piece things together. Drawing on the lessons of centuries of literature, philosophy and visual art, Dillon interprets the relics of his parents and of his childhood in a singularly original and arresting piece of writing.
Big Fellow, Long Fellow: A Joint Biography of Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera by T. Ryle Dwyer
Paperback; 13 Euro / 16 USD / 9 UK; 380 pages [Add To Basket]
"This is the only comparative biography of Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins, and as such has established itself as a standard work. It is now re-issued in pocket paperback format for the first time. As fairly and as dispassionately as possible, Dwyer explores the stark differences in the background and personalities of his two subjects; the abandoned, probably illegitimate and essentially loveless childhood of de Valera sharply counterpoints the warm close environment into which Collins was born ...Dwyer's assessment of the two characters is fair." - Diarmaid Ferriter, "Evening Herald". "This is an excellent book and goes far to giving a rounder picture of the relationship between the two men than some earlier works. In particular, Collins emerges as a pretty good schemer himself, being a brilliant networker through his control of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, his contacts in the police and civil bureaucracies in both Britain and Ireland and through his connections in the world of shipping and communications ...one thing that comes out of Dwyer's analysis very starkly is de Valera's fantastic self-confidence or self-righteousness, depending on one's point of view ...a well-w " - Tom Garvin, "Irish University Review
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