|
Read Ireland Book Reviews, September 2001
Company: A Chosen
Life by John Montague
This book is the first volume of John
Montague’s memoir. It gives an evocative account of a phenomenally vibrant
era in poetry and letters. Separated from his own family at the age of
four in the 1930s, John Montague threw himself into the literary life
of 1950s Dublin and Paris as into the arms of a surrogate family. Basking
in the freedom of the bohemian world, the ghosts of the great poetic figures
who populate this book include Samuel Beckett, a friend and neighbour
in Paris for a decade, and in Dublin, the ‘inspired lunatic’ Brendan Behan,
and Mrs. Yeats.
[ top ]
Making Ireland
British 1580-1650 by Nicholas Canny
This book is the first comprehensive
study of the settlements implanted by Ireland by English and Scottish
people during the years 1580-1650. The arguments advanced by successive
political figures in favour of a plantation policy for Ireland are examined,
as are the responses which this policy elicited from the several segments
of the population of Ireland. Attention is also given to practical considerations
that have had a bearing on colonisation schemes in all places and at all
times: staking a claim to resources, recruiting suitable settles, and
fashioning a new society and economy. The book opens with an analysis
of the writings of Edmund Spenser, the most articulate sixteenth-century
zealot for plantation. The author contends that the policies of all subsequent
sponsors of plantations, ranging from King James VI and I, the Strafford,
to Oliver Cromwell, were measured against his Spenserian yardstick. The
book culminates in its Irish, British, and Continental European contexts,
and it shows how this eruption steeled Cromwell to engage in one last
attempt to make Ireland British.
[ top ]
Atlas of Irish
Place Names by Patrick J. O’Connor
This atlas provides a guide to accessing
the place names of Ireland. The townland pattern and the townland names
form in the most intimate and defiant terms the basis of the identity
of modern Ireland. It is how natives and newcomers alike know, or get
to know, the country. The names, as ever, carry charge, cadence and meaning.
And the name elements, when mapped, chart the nature of the land, or our
precursor’s ideas of it, what they wanted from it and could actually achieve
with it. At best we may encounter in the aggregates of mapped items a
‘geophony’, a showing forth of the earth. At the least we will elicit
the distributional evidence, activate culture clues over time and space,
and suggest the parameters of regionalism. Altogether over 50,000 symbols
take the representational form of a paper landscape in this book.
The Dublin Metropolitan
Police by Jim Herlihy
This book is a complete alphabetical
list of the officers and men of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, 1836-1925.
Evil Empire: John Gilligan, his Gang and the Execution of Journalist Veronica
Guerin by Paul Williams Ruthless godfather John Gilligan controlled a
colossal drugs empire and a mob of gangland’s most dangerous criminals.
Violence and the threat of murder kept terrified witnesses silent and
other gangsters in fear. Gilligan thought himself untouchable and above
the law - until his gang crossed the line by executing crime reporter
Veronica Guerin. This book tells the chilling inside story of Gilligan’s
rise to power, his savage gang and the truth about the horrifying murder
that shocked the Irish nation and indeed the world. Revealed for the first
time, too, is the intense behind-the-scenes drama of the dedicated police
squad who waged an unprecedented four-year war to smash ‘Factory’ John’s
evil empire.
[ top ]
Out of Time: Irish
Republican Prisoners Long Kesh 1972-2000 by Laurence McKeown
The author of this book was sentenced
to life imprisonment in April 1977. In 1981, he joined the Hunger Strike
led by Bobby Sands and refused food for 70 days until he fell into a coma.
He went on to spend a total of sixteen years in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh.
During that time he was at the centre of protest and struggle against
the British government’s attempts to criminalise republicanism and destroy
commitment to the republican ideal. In this book he records the experiences
of himself and twenty-four other leading republicans. The prisoners span
the period from the early 1970s until the closing of the H-Blocks at Long
Kesh in 2000, following the provisions for the release of political prisoners
which formed part of the historic Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Beyond the Mist:
What Irish Mythology Can Teach Us About Ourselves by Peter O’Connor
In this book, the author shows how
ancient mythology can be used to understand the universal themes and conflicts
that have beset human beings throughout time. From gods and goddesses
such as Dagda and Morrigan, to the Fenian and Ulster Cycles and the heroic
stories of Cu Chulainn, the author explores the world of Irish mythology
and its relevance today. Full of fascinating insights, this book introduces
the reader to all the richness and magic of Irish mythology, and shows
how it can be mined for the wisdom it provides for contemporary life.
[ top ]
Living Energies
new edition by Callum Coats
This book is subtitled: An Exposition
of Concepts Related to the Theories of Viktor Schauberger. Why are so
many species of plant and animal life disappearing? How it is that Earth
is losing more fresh water than it is producing? What are the effects
of chlorination and fluoridation of water? This answers to these and many
more pressing environmental questions are to be found in this remarkable
book - the first in-depth examination of the life and work of the brilliant
forester, scientist, and pioneering inventor, Viktor Schauberger. Schauberger’s
insights into Nature pivoted on the essential characteristics of water
as a living and pulsating substance that energises all of life, both organic
and inorganic. He was passionate about forestry and warned how deforestation
would deplete the world of water and soil fertility, causing deserts and
climate chaos. With his ground-breaking concepts on energy, biomagnetism
and the true function of trees, he showed how a world that exploited its
resources rather than cherishing them was doomed to destroy itself.
[ top ]
The Celts: Life,
Myth and Art by Juliette Wood
This book showcases the art of the
Celts in all its glory, from exquisite gold jewellery to spectacular decorated
weapons of war. It presents a superb pictorial record of the Celts, with
specially commissioned artworks and over 100 magnificent full colour photographs.
It illustrates the full splendour of Celtic manuscript illumination and
the astonishing intricacy of knotwork and other patterning. It reveals,
with full commentary, the broad repertoire of Celtic symbols and motifs
- from solar spirals to the salmon of prophecy. It provides a fascinating
and authoritative text to accompany the rich treasury of images.
[ top ]
Irish Classics
by Declan Kiberd
In this ambitious survey of the enduring Irish classics - works that stay
fresh and challenge every generation - the author offers his readers something
original: a brilliant and accessible discussion of the greatest works
since 1600 in the two languages that have shaped one of the world’s most
vibrant literary cultures. Each chapter is devoted to the art of a single
writer, and usually focuses on an outstanding representative text. The
book opens with a meditation on the fall of the bardic order as part of
the catastrophe that engulfed traditional Irish society after the Elizabethan
and Cromwellian wars. Irish poets encountered modernity as a cataclysm,
and were forced to respond to it by using traditional forms in novel and
radical ways, at once conservative and revolutionary. The author argues
that his formal tension has remained one of the most distinctive characteristics
of literature produced in Ireland. He is equally at home discussing the
mordant poetry in the Irish language, and his account of the great elegy,
‘The Lament for Art O’Leary’ is a tour de force. And his chapters on lesser
known writers will be a revelation to many readers. The book closes with
a moving and daring coda on the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and the claim that
the seeds of the Agreement ‘were sown in the works of Irish literature’;
for as the author argues, ‘an unprecedented knowledge is possible in zones
where cultures collide.’
[ top ]
Irish Fairs and
Markets edited by Denis Cronin, Jim Gilligan and Karina Holton
This book is the first major study
of buying and selling at local level in Ireland. The contributors analyse
different aspects of the exchange and sales of goods at fairs, markets
and shops from the middle ages to the present day. Assemblies at fairs
and markets brought together people from very different social backgrounds
and played an important part in shaping local society. Town met country,
farmer met trader, and the influences of the wider world were introduced
into the local culture. These essays highlight the diversity of the Irish
local experience in trading and make a fundamental contribution to our
understanding of the evolution of Irish society.
A History of the
Black Death in Ireland by Maria Kelly
In this book, the first full-length
study of the Black Death in Ireland, the author goes in search of the
Great Pestilence whose consequences are often obscured by the intricate
and tumultuous history of the time and the paucity of contemporary records.
Drawing on a wide range of sources, both Irish and European, the author
traces the progress of the plague throughout Ireland, examines how the
people reacted to this invisible killer, and accesses its legacy in the
troubled conditions of medieval Ireland.
[ top ]
Literary Tour
of Ireland by Elizabeth Healy
This book is a delightful Irish journey
enriched and transformed by the oral and literary traditions of Ireland’s
landscape. W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory are the readers’ guides to the
Sligo hills and their mystical presences. We meet Synge in Wicklow and
O’Flaherty on the Aran Islands, O’Connor in Blarney Street, Cork and John
Hewitt at him home on the Antrim coast - a host of voices, including Ireland’s
greatest tale of all, the ancient Tain. Belfast greets the reader in the
poetry of Ciaran Carson, and the footsteps of Seamus Heaney bring us around
Mossbawn. We view the villages where Goldsmith gambled and drank away
his youth, and befriend the penniless poets of ‘Hidden Ireland’ whose
exquisite Irish verse is still echoed in modern song and story. In Dublin
are Wilde, Shaw, and Swift, O’Casey, Joyce and Beckett - pouring words
upon the cityscapes. Finally, the reader enters Healy’s own beloved Liffey,
plurabella, to complete a rewarding and exciting travelogue.
[ top ]
Gangster by John
Mooney
In the summer of 1996, the Irish
journalist Veronica Guerin was assassinated because of her investigations
into organised crime in Ireland. This book recreates the story behind
her murder while chronicling the life of the man charged with her killing,
John Gilligan. Written from an inside perspective, the book is a fine
piece of investigative journalism - uncompromising in its exposure of
Gilligan’s life, his meteoric rise in the Irish underworld, his personality
and his blatant disregard for law and order - and it forms an intriguing
and menacing story. This book is the definitive account of how a criminal
organisation, headed by a brutal and unscrupulous leader, can ride roughshod
over society’s moral and civil codes.
Shaping Things
to Come: Strategies for Creating Alternative Enterprises by Colin Coulson-Thomas
This book is a futuristic, cutting-edge
appraisal of what organisational development in the early years of the
new millennium will be life. Its importance for the business market of
the twenty-first century cannot be overestimated. The author suggests
that rather than organisations becoming even more depersonalised, technological
advance will enable more intimate, interactive and iterative relationships,
and certainly more individual and inner growth and development than has
previously been experienced.
[ top ]
Voyage of the
Hougoumont and Life and Fremantle: The Story of an Irish Rebel by Thomas
McCarthy
Fennell Like many 19th century Irish
immigrants, Thomas McCarthy Fennell arrived in the United States to start
a new life. Unlike other Irishmen, however, Fennell arrived on America’s
West coast by ship. He was a thirty year-old ex-convict recently released
from an Australian prison. As a condition of his release he could not
return to his native land. His crime? Treason, or as the Crown’s trial
judge put it: ‘compassing’ against Queen Victoria. In the tumultuous 1860s,
Fennell organised Fenians - the Irish-American Nationalists who sought
by force to rid Ireland of Britain’s dominance. He fought and was wounded
in the 1867 Uprising, hardly a footnote in history, yet England’s Prime
Minister Gladstone would refer to it as ‘the first streak of dawn.’
An Irish Murder:
The Legacy of Tarring Cottage by Caitlin O’Connell
In this novel, Irish detective Rupert
Dunne lives a divided existence between a big city career in Dublin and
lesser policing matter at home in County Cork. Now estranged from his
English wife and at a personal impasse, he finds himself contemplating
the possibilities of early retirement. However, the usually peaceful countryside
of Cork has other things in store for him. This book is the first in a
projected series of murder mysteries set in current day Ireland.
[ top ]
Towards a Culture
of Human Rights in Ireland by Ivana Bacik and Stephen Livingstone
Two leading civil liberties advocates,
Ivana Bacik in Dublin and Stephen Livingstone in Belfast, look at the
state of human rights in their respective jurisdictions. Professor Bacik,
Reid Professor of Criminal Law at Trinity College, Dublin, looks at the
impact of the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights
into Irish law on the rights to silence, freedom of expression and equality
and the rights of the family, immigrants and children and asks will it
generate a ‘culture of rights’ in the Republic. Professor Livingstone
examines the human rights provisions of the Good Friday Agreement, and
outlines the challenges which still face the implementation of an effective
rights culture in Northern Ireland.
Multi-culturalism:
The View from the Two Irelands by Edna Longley and Declan Kiberd
Two of Ireland’s most outspoken critics
and cultural commentators put forward views on the contrasting directions
in which the two societies on the island are moving. Professor Longley
asks whether Northerners will increasingly identify with Northern Ireland
as a shared point of reference. Will they develop a more flexible sense
of their relations with the Republic and a post-devolution Britain? Professor
Kiberd asks whether a newly prosperous and confident Republic is genuinely
embracing multi-culturalism. Is it moving towards a post-nationalist society
which commits its citizens to a truly pluralist vision? What does it mean
to be Irish at the turn of the twenty-first century?
[ top ]
Can the Celtic
Tiger Cross the Irish Border? By John Bradley and Esmond Birnie
One of the Republic’s outstanding
economists, John Bradley, and the prominent Unionist politician and economist,
Esmond Birnie, debate to what extent Northern Ireland can learn from the
phenomenon of the ‘Celtic Tiger’. Professor Bradley asks what lessons
the North can take from the success of the Republic’s economic planning,
and whether it makes sense for the island to trade and seek investment
as one unit in a globalised economy. Dr. Birnie asks if the lost level
of trade and economic interchange between the two Irish economies is really
that abnormal in European terms, and whether a successfully co-ordinated
island economy is possible in two separate political jurisdictions.
Turlough by Brian
Keenan
While held hostage by fundamentalist
Shi’ite militiamen in the suburbs of Beirut, Brian Keenan was visited
and sustained by the presence of Turlough O’ Carolan - the legendary blind
Irish harper of the 17th century. This novel is thus a re-creation of
an extraordinary historical story and a personal debt repaid. It is also,
obliquely, a parallel life - another life imprisoned, shaped by the dark.
Narrated largely by O’Carolan from his deathbed, and through the recollections
of those closest to him, the novel powerfully brings to life a lost Ireland
of famine and disease, eviction and oppression. Stalking through the broken
and dispossessed comes Turlough O’Carolan, the musical prodigy, blinded
by smallpox and now an itinerant harper, lauded by the aristocracy and
a hero to his people. His Rabelaisian desire for drink and women is counterpointed
by his artistic struggle towards the great music and some kind of inner
peace. Driven by demons and dreams, riven by contradictions, Turlough
emerges as a great man, full of frailty: a blind man afraid of the dark.
A panoramic picaresque, rich with the textures and smells of rural Ireland
and peopled by a host of angels and devils, this novel is a remarkable
historical journey, and a huge imaginative feat. This book was our Book
of the Month - Fiction for October 2000.
[ top ]
|