Read Ireland Book Reviews, Feburary 2001

Short Walks in Ireland by Tom Lawton
This book contains 20 superb short walking routes stretching from Wicklow to Connemara and Mayo. Each walk is combined with a visit to a nearby place of interest to make a memorable day out. Lavishly illustrated with stunning colour photographs and innovative, computer-generated route diagrams with relief profiles for each walk. Also contains contact details for local walking guides, accommodation and places to eat.

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Exploring Irish Mammals by Tom Hayden and Rory Harrington
Isolated from continental Europe, the mammalian fauna of the island of Ireland is surprisingly rich and varied. As unusual and diverse assemblage of species, how they arrived here and their reason for staying have long intrigued both enthusiast and scholar. Such puzzles are explored in this book, the first accessible, authoritative telling of this unique and fascinating story. Accompanied by vivid and meticulously worked illustrations, two of Ireland’s leading zoologists chronicle the history of mammal life on this island. They explore the species that are currently to be found on land or in the waters around the coast, and they offer fascinating close-up studies of the more shy and elusive animals. Beautifully illustrated, this is an invaluable sourcebook which seeks to emphasise the great diversity, richness and heritage value of Ireland’s wild animals.

The Names Upon the Harp: Irish Myth and Legend by Marie Heaney
The heroes and villains of Irish myth and legend have fascinated generation after generation for over 2,000 years. Fiercely fought battles, passionate romances, spells and curses, loyalty and betrayal: these tales combine all the essential ingredients of great drama with unforgettable storytelling. Marie Heaney and prize-winning illustrator P.J. Lynch present their own interpretation of one of the world’s greatest literary traditions in this stunning collection, which also includes a previously unpublished poem translated from the Irish by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney.

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Ireland: An Island Revealed by Molly McAnailly
Burke and Lindsay Hunt This beautiful book presents a unique portrait of Ireland today, including specially commissioned images by top photographer Simon McBride. Four double gatefolds make the most of outstanding photos. The accompanying text offers insight into the people and places, history and tradition. The book is organised by geographical regions, and coverage includes both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. This book celebrates the mood and the landscapes, people and places which make Ireland a special place in so many hearts.

Send’em Home Sweatin’: The Irish Showband Story by Vincent Power
This book takes a deep look at a uniquely Irish phenomenon - the showbands. It describes a remarkable period in Irish life, when showbands epitomised glamour and generated the kind of hysteria that youngsters today reserve for international superstars. It is also a social history of the period when the showbands were at their peak. The ballrooms where they played were an important role in the social life or rural and small-town Ireland at a time when there were few alternative venues for young people to meet and enjoy themselves. This book vividly evokes nostalgia for the excitement, the euphoria and the innocence of these ballroom days.

The Irish Times Book of the Year 1999-2000 by Peter Murtagh
This book contains a selection of the very best news stories, features, reports, cartoons and photographs for the year from September 1999 to September 2000. Drawing on the unrivalled resources of Ireland’s leading newspaper, it recalls the year that has passed. It was a year in which the millennium bug did not bite. It was a year of ever growing scandals and new revelations about the seamy side of Irish public life. It was a year in which high hopes for the Northern Ireland peace process were almost dashed by the impasse over decommissioning. It was a year in which the Celtic Tiger continued to roar, although with worrying signs of inflation creeping into the system.

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Father Browne’s Ships and Shipping by E.E. O’Donnell
This book is a unique maritime record and memoir by one of the 20th century’s great photographers. Father Frank Browne’s maritime fame and international recognition began with his extraordinary pictures of the Titanic. Those photographs had been discovered in his personal album of photographs, and published to international acclaim in 1997. His albums contained many other photographs, and this volume reproduces a wide selection, most never previously published. It records and reveals the photographer’s deep love of sea travel and his understanding of the historical and cultural significance of the world of ships.

The Big House in Ireland by Valerie Pakenham
The Big House has haunted the Irish landscape and imagination for nearly four hundred years. This book attempts to recreate the world of the ‘Big House’ from the words of those who lived there - or stayed there - quoting from letters, diaries, memoirs, household accounts and travellers’ tales. The author has been able to draw on a huge reservoir of private collections of family papers, many of them hitherto unpublished. Part of the book is devoted to the private lives of those who lived there, many of them as racy as the stock characters of Irish fiction: duels, adultery, abduction, family feuds - and extravagant hospitality leading to gout and insolvency. It also deals with their relations with their retainers and with their servants. Another section of the book deals with the relationship of the ‘Big House’ with the world outside its gates, including its response to the horrors of the Great Famine, to the Land War of the 1830s, and to the Troubles of the early 1920s which led to the burning of over seventy country houses and the collapse of the Ascendancy world. The last chapter deals with the survivors who chose to stay on and the astonishing renaissance of the Irish country house in the twenty-first century. This book is sumptuously illustrated throughout with contemporary paintings, drawings, photographs and caricatures, as well as superb new photographs by Thomas Pakenham.

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The Making of the Celtic Tiger by Ray Mac Sharry and Padraic White
This book is the story of the remarkable social partnership between government, unions and business that underpinned the transformation: how the Emerald Isle on the edge of Europe became a European centre for the world’s leading companies, how foreign investment became a powerful driving force behind the economic miracle and how Ireland won billions in European Union funding at a crucial point in its economic take-off. The authors also recount how Ireland created a leading International Financial Services Centre as a result of a unique public and private sector collaboration.

Lockout Dublin 1913 by Padraig Yeates
This book is the story of the most famous labour dispute in Irish history. At 9:40 a.m. on Tuesday, 26 August 1913, the trams stopped running in Dublin. Striking conductors and drivers abandoned their vehicles. They had refused a demand from their employer to forswear union membership or face dismissal. The company then locked them out. Within a month, the charismatic union leader, James Larkin, had called out over 20,000 workers across the city in sympathetic action. This titanic struggle was played out in the city with the worst slums and greatest poverty of any capital in northern Europe. This book is first detailed account of Ireland’s greatest industrial conflict, set against the backdrop of the home rule crisis and major developments in the British labour movement. In telling this extraordinary story, the author also surveys the social life and politics of Dublin on the eve of the Great War.

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Ireland and the Great War by Keith Jeffrey
This book explores the impact, both immediate and in its longer historical perspective, of the First World War upon Ireland across the broadest range of experience - nationalist, unionist, Catholic, Protestant - and in civilian social, economic and cultural terms, as well as purely military. Underscoring the work is a belief that the Great War is the single most central experience in twentieth-century Ireland and that the events of the war years, whether at home in Dublin during the Easter Rising or at the European battlefront, constitute a ‘seamless robe’ of Irish experience. The book also explores cultural responses to the war and its commemoration since 1918, up to the dedication of the Irish ‘Peace Tower’ in Belgium in November 1998.

Women in Parliament: Ireland, 1918-2000 by Maedhbh McNamara and Paschal Mooney
This is the first study of its kind. It contains comprehensive directories of women elected to the Dail and Seanad, and details of women in the Presidency, Irish women members of the European Parliament and women elected to represent Northern Ireland in its Parliaments and at Westminister. This book is essential reading and reference for everyone with an interest in Irish politics and history, or women’s affairs in twentieth-century Ireland.

The Shifting Balance of Power: Exploring the 20th Century by Joe Lee
Joe Lee’s column in the (Irish) Sunday Tribune has broken new ground in the way it looks at history and how the momentous events of the 20th century shaped the world we live in. Collected here are the 43 essays that formed the series: ‘Joe Lee’s 20th Century’. He explores the great wars and the great events in a way that so brings to life what was in so many ways the greatest, and in so many ways the most terrible of centuries.

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Mayo’s Lost Islands: The Inishkeas by Brian Dornan
The Inishkeas are low-lying islands a few miles off the coast of the Mullet peninsula in County Mayo. The past 4000 years have seen several layers of settlement on the islands. This book focuses on the last 100 years in the life of the Inishkea community, ending in the 1930s. It uses documents, folklore records and reminiscences of islanders to examine all aspects of island life. It includes: the land and its tenants; marriage patterns; the sea and fishing customs; housing, religion, schooling and superstition; the whaling industry of the early twentieth century; and place names and family names.

Streets Broad and Narrow: Images of Vanishing Dublin by Kevin C. Kearns
This selection of photographs provides a visual chronicle of Dublin inner-city life over the past generations. In sharp contrast to standard Dublin photographic books that feature famous places and personages, this is a ‘grass-roots’ collection that portrays the common people going about their ordinary daily life. There is a gritty reality in the faces of weathered street dealers, crusty horse traders, gang kids, street buskers, pavement gamblers, and frolicking kids.

The Irish Highwaymen by Stephen Dunford
This book contains enthralling true stories of the brigands, rapparees and highwaymen of Irish history. The lives and times of fifteen of Ireland’s most notorious adventurers are told here: audacious ambushes, sword and gun battles with landlords and military, daring escapes, hideouts and disguised identities, plots, betrayals and raids - and sometimes brutal ends by hanging, beheading or gunfire. The action-packed stories weave historical events and local folklore; here together for the first time, too, are the traditional Irish songs and music that grew around each of the highwayman’s legend. Beautifully illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings, maps and photographs of still-existing landmarks and memorabilia.

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The Port of Medieval Dublin by Andrew Halpin
During the second phase of construction of the new Civic Offices, Dublin,in the early 1990s, an archaeological excavation of the proposed car park area was undertaken by the author on behalf of Dublin Corporation. The excavation revealed evidence for remains of wooden revetments, dating to the later part of the 12th century, and also the remains of a substantial masonry structure. Historical research indicates that the stone building may be the remains of the 13th century Tholsel or Guildhall, indicating continuity of function on this site.

Sonia O’Sullivan: Running to Stand Still by Patrick Bolger and Tom Humphries
The people of Ireland and the its diaspora will forever remember the moment Sonia O’Sullivan won her long coveted Olympic Medal in Sydney. This book tells the story of the trials and triumphs of Ireland’s most-loved sporting heroine. Contains numerous photographs.

Where He Sported and Played: Jack Lynch by Liam O Tuama
Jack Lynch has been regarded as one of Ireland’s most outstanding sportsmen and has earned the respect of players and spectators, both on and off the field. He played his first competitive match at the age of 12 and had a very successful sporting career in both hurling and football. He has earned the unique achievement of winning six All Ireland medals in a row.

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To Hell and Back: The Inside Story of the Clare Hurling Revival by Mike McNamara with Cian Murphy
Former Clare coach Mike McNamara talks candidly about his hurling creed, and tells the inside story of the seminal campaign that led to two All-Irelands, three Munster championships and Clare’s renaissance as a hurling power. Together with Ger Loughnane, McNamara’s ground-breaking training techniques created the legendary Clare team of the 1990s.

The Final Whistle by Brendan Fullam
This book relives the glories of past and present of the Irish national games of hurling and Gaelic football. It recalls the great players of the past, and gives new generations the chance to debate and speculate on the many sporting events that have passed beyond living memory.

Greatest Sporting Memories edited by Sean Og Ceallachain
This book captures, for the first time in book form, the greatest Irish sporting moments written by 50 leading sports writers, commentators and experts in their chosen fields.

I Remember It Well by Jimmy Magee and Sean McGoldrick
Jimmy Magee has been broadcasting for over 40 years. This book records the personal and sporting memories of this most colourful and respected sports journalist.

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Hurling Heroes: Fourteen Hurling Greats Profiled by Eddie Keher
This book offers biographies of 14 of the greatest hurling players. The players featured offer a good cross-section of the many hurling heroes that have thrilled sporting enthusiasts over the years.

Flashbacks: A Half Century of Cork Hurling by Pat Nolan
Primarily a record of Cork’s championship hurling over fifty years, this book describes the highs and lows and passions. It introduces teams and players from other counties, the heroes and stars of many a day. It also recalls the popular music, social history and current affairs of the times. The book had its origins in the author’s love of hurling and memories of stirring matches as boy and man. His vivid recall of match days includes travelling, pre- and post-match atmosphere, the joys, the heartbreak, the tension and the fun. The book provides a lively mix of sport, politics, history and music.

The Legend of Istabraq by Michael Clower
Istabraq is one of the greatest hurdlers of all time, only the fifth horse in racing history to win three consecutive Champion Hurdles, and with the legendary Arkle and Golden Miller, one of only three horses to win at four Cheltenham festivals in a row. This book, however, is much more that this story of a famous racehorse. Parallel to the big race glory is the tragedy of the man who first recognised the horse’s phenomenal potential, John Durkan, who was tragically struck down with leukaemia and was forced to follow the horse’s early jumping career from a hospital bed. This compelling account reveals the torment suffered by Durkan’s family, and also provides fascinating insights into the lives of those closest to the horse, including the brilliant trainer Aidan O’Brien and Charlie Swan, the most successful Irish jockey of all time.

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Full Time: The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino as told to Paul Kimmage
In this compelling and unique book, the reader meets Ireland’s international football hero and a man scarred by childhood, haunted by indiscretion and troubled by a secret from his past.

My Dream of You by Nuala O’Faolain
Nuala O’Faolain’s autobiography, Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, was a number one bestseller in Ireland for 26 weeks. This book is her first novel. Kathleen is a travel writer based in London. The office is the nearest thing she has to a home, and her colleagues to friends and a family. And then, on the brink of middle age, the props of her life fall away. She is faced with the frightening imperative of change. In her crisis she turns to a new kind of writing, and decides to investigate a story about a relationship so passionate that it burned its way across the barriers of class and culture; a true story she had long known in fragments - a scandal that become public when a wealthy Anglo-Irish landlord sought a divorce from his wife on the grounds of her adultery with one of the servants. The affair was played out in 1850s Ireland, against the background of a country devastated by the Famine. Kathleen is Irish herself, but she has not been back to Ireland for almost thirty years. Now, she travels to a remote part of the country to research the story of the lovers. Thus starts a journey that leads her not only into the historical past, but into a reconsideration of the family she fled years ago. And then she meets a lover of her own who presents her with a choice that could alter her life. As she moves towards her decision she calls on the strengths of her identity as a women, an Irish woman and a woman who is no longer young. And meanwhile, she brings the story of the long-ago lovers to a denouement as tender as it is tragic.

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The Last of the Irish Males by Joseph O’Connor
This book is the author’s grand finale to the hilarious best-selling ‘Irish Male’ series - one last look at the bitter-sweet realities that the Irish male encounters at home and abroad as the new Millennium rips up the rulebook. His take on the times is as comical as ever, whether lost in the new Europe, undressing America, surfing the style-waves of the 21st century, tangling with the world-wide web, or pondering that deepest of philosophical questions - is football actually better than sex? From hopping and bopping in the traditional Irish night-club to swapping his gender in an Internet cybersex chatroom, from being New Lad to becoming New Dad, this is furiously funny, truly unforgettable stuff. While his Complete Idiot’s Dating Agency offers every Irish male a chance at romance, a special section for the sophisticated modern woman, The Irish Male: A User’s Manual might actually help to save many relationships - or at least keep them going until divorce gets cheaper.

The Heritage of Ireland edited by Neil Buttimer, Colin Rynne and Helen Guerin
This book is the first multidisciplinary approach to defining and describing Ireland’s rich and complex heritage and analysing its protection and management. It is presented in three main parts, each includes case studies illustrating issues highlighted: Natural, Man-Made and Cultural Heritage; Conservation and Interpretation; and Administration and Business. It also provides authoritative and detailed accounts of heritage legislation and EU institutions and directives dealing with heritage in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Its contributors include academics, professionals, and practitioners from Ireland, north and south.

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All Souls: Growing Up in Boston’s Irish Ghetto by Michael Patrick MacDonald
The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston’s working class Irish community, branding it a violent, racist enclave. But the threats - poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world - were real. The author of this memoir lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty. This book is his heart-breaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be ‘the best place in the world.’ It is a story of extraordinary characters like Ma, Michael’s mini-skirted, accordion-playing, usually single mother who cares for her children - there are eventually ten - through a combination of high spirits and inspired ‘getting over’. But it is also a tale of a place controlled by resident gangster Whitey Bulger, an FBI informant who ran the drug culture Southie supposedly never had. The result was a world primed for the escalation of class violence - and then, with deadly and sickening inevitability, the racial violence that swirled around force bussing. All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that doesn’t allow him to feel it, the author gets out. His work as a peace-activist, first in the all-Black neighborhoods of nearby Roxbury, then back to the Southie he can’t help but love, is the powerfully redemptive close to a story that leaves readers utterly shaken and changed.

The Story of O: The Autobiography of an Irish Outlaw by Olaf Tyaransen
Olaf Tyaransen is a published poet and journalist who has also stood for election in Ireland as a Legalise Cannabis candidate. In this book, and still at the tender age of 28, he has written an Irish memoir like no other before it. For anyone who went from their teens to their 20s, as the 80s gave way to the 90s, this book will strike numerous ringing chords - especially if, like the author, they happened to sup on a wild and sometimes dangerous brew of music, literature, rebellion, sex, drugs, drink, and love found but more often lost. With this book, Irish writing has delivered its first outlaw autobiography, a story of excess, success and the price you sometimes pay.

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Harry Boland: A Man Divided by Andrew Brasier and John Kelly
This biography is an overview of one of Ireland’s most loved figures in its struggle for independence. Much of Boland’s life was shrouded in mystery and necessary secrecy that not even his family or closest friends were aware of. This book brings his life to the fore and is also of significant historical importance.

Astride the Moon: A Theatrical Life by Vincent Dowling
This is the story of a little boy from Dublin who became an internationally acclaimed actor and director. Through Dowling’s eyes, we see the child ‘mitching’ from school. The teenager ‘coorting’ in Herbert Park. The young man discovering with delight the two passions of his life - theatre and women. The Abbey actor organising a revolutionary strike. And, at last, the Wild Rover realising that ‘I would do anything for Ireland, truly I would, except live there’ With frankness and passion, the author takes the reader on a rollicking, riveting ride through an unforgettable life lived to the full.

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Making Sense of the Troubles by David McKittrick and David McVea
Compellingly written and completely even-handed, this book is the clearest account of what happened in the Northern Ireland conflict - and why. The Troubles in Northern Ireland rolled grimly on for almost thirty years from the late 1960s until the onset of the current shaky peace process. In that time, the conflict never strayed far off the news schedules of the world’s media. Thousands of books, articles and theses were published, dissecting every possible aspect of the problem and making it the most researched civil conflict in modern history. But behind the wall of information and opinion there is a straightforward and gripping story, demanding to be told in an accessible way. This book is that story.

The Long Watch: World War Two and the Irish Mercantile Marine by Frank Forde
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Ireland declared neutrality and thus became isolated as never before. But it was imperative to continue essential overseas trading. A lifeline had to be formed and so the nucleus of a merchant marine was established. For the following five years a tiny fleet of vessels ventured the seas under the Tricolour, the badge of neutrality clearly emblazoned on their hulls. This book is the story of that fleet, diminutive in size but large in heroism. It is the story also of the exceptional courage of the mariners themselves, many of whom perished as victims of a war in which they were non-participants. It is a dramatic and authentic book that documents the remarkable achievement and grievous losses of the Irish mercantile marine during the Second World War. Contains numerous photographs.

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Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784-1886 by Sean Farrell
Sectarian violence is one of the defining characteristics of the modern Ulster experience. Riots between Catholic and Protestant crowds occurred with depressing frequency throughout the 19th century, particularly within the constricted spaces of the province’s burgeoning industrial capital, Belfast. From the Armagh Troubles in 1784 to the Belfast Riots on 1886, ritual confrontations led to regular outbreaks of sectarian conflict. This, in turn, helped keep Catholic/Protestant antagonism at the heart of the political and cultural discussion in the north or Ireland. This book has at its core a subject frequently ignored - the rioters themselves. Rather than focusing on political and religious leaders in a top-down model, the author demonstrates how lower-class attitudes gave rise to violent clashes and dictated the responses of the elite.

Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Union: Ireland in the 1790s edited by Jim Smyth
This volume of essays explores United Irish propaganda and organisation, and looks at the forces of revolution before and during the 1798 rebellion. It also begins to redress imbalances in the historiography of the period by turning to the face of counter-revolution - examining the crisis in law and order, the role of the magistrates, the strengths and weaknesses of the state, and the scope and character of the repression following the rebellion. Other essays consider the short-term and longer-term consequences of these momentous events, including their impact upon the churches, the Act of Union, and the politics of early nineteenth-century America

The Falling Angels: An Irish Romance by John Walsh
‘I was the kid who had hung out for far too long on the stairs in his dressing-gown, eavesdropping on the sounds of adult conviviality, but invited to enter the mysteries at last.’ This book is an exuberant memoir of growing up London-Irish, of having two identities and being caught between both. As a child, John Walsh found the Irishness of his parents’ Battersea home bemusing. Here was an enclave of Ireland’s mystic west, transported to London’s South Circular Road, where performance and after-dinner singing were mandatory, where the gossip and visitors were Irish, and where Catholic priests invaded the kitchen for tea, barm-brack and a waltz with his mother. Ireland too was a puzzle. It was a family holiday destination that meant rain, dry-stone walls and blue bubble gum. It was a country that seemed to scatter its tribes of exiles across the globe, a place his mother had escaped from and his father only longed to return to. But as a teenager spellbound by Mick Jagger and images of Catholic martyrdom, the author discovers an extended family in a Galway he never know existed. In this new world of hoolies, spook-haunts and wakes, and ultimately through the death of his mother, he begins to understand the Irish Way of Life and Death and the heart of his Hibernian roots. Witty, intimate and full of illuminating insights into exile, religion and the culture of ‘belonging’, this book is a the passionate tale of one man’s relationship with a mythic and mercurial homeland. This book was our choice for Book of the Month Non Fiction for January 2000.

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