Read Ireland Book Reviews, July 1998

Ivana Bacik
Ronan Bennett
Diana Boullier
Lisa Carey
Denis Carroll
Robert Cremins
Krystyna Dobrynska-Cantwell
John Evans
William Griffin
Noel Henry
Michael Holroyd
Jennifer Lash
James Livesey
Sean Lysaght
Roger McHugh
Geoffrey Moorhouse
Tom Murphy
Michael O’Connell
Anne Marie O’Grady
Tom Phelan
F. Glenn Thompson
Padraig Tyers

Exploring Irish Music and Dance by Diana Boullier
The perfect introduction to Irish music and dance! Handed down over the generations, Irish music and dance have travelled from kitchens and cross-roads on the world stage. But where did all these tunes come from? What makes Irish music unique and so lively? This book tells about the tunes, where they come from, their weird and whacky titles, the players, the old masters, the dance steps and patterns and lots more. There are stories too from the oral tradition which weave together fairy lore with music and dance. The book also contains wonderful illustrations by Julian Friers.

Sun Dancing: A Medieval Vision by Geoffrey Moorhouse
Off the west coast of Ireland, just visible on a clear day, two jagged rocks rise sheer our of the Atlantic: the Skelligs adamantly inhospitable and uninhabited today. Yet, the larger of the two was for 600 years home to a community of monks. In a remarkable feat of imagination and reconstruction, the author shows how this community worshipped and survived. The book is astonishingly effective in making the monks come alive again as well as being a hugely impressive history of monastic life in Medieval Ireland.

Bernard Shaw by Michael Holroyd
The one-volume definitive edition of Holroyd’s masterpiece biography, this elegant volume is a conglomerate of four detailed volumes and it will serve admirably for the millennium and do justice to a great Irishman.

Everything Irish by AnneMarie O’Grady
This book is an exciting introductory book to all things Irish for children. Children learn a little about a broad range of Irish topics and make ornaments, souvenirs and wearable or decorative items based on Irish themes. The reader can make a laughing leprechaun, a charming Irish cottage, a troupe of dancers, Celtic-style jewellery and learns about Ireland’s past and about life in Ireland. Also teaches ‘The Leprechaun Song.’

Pilgrims by John Evans
Michael Dwyer is an expatriate: an Irishman from Wexford who has chosen to live in Germany. Summoned home for his father’s funeral, he is forced to face the past that he has struggled to escape. He is grimly determined not to let his homeland re-establish its grip on him and manages for the moment to side step his responsibilities. But Michael’s life is not a simple choice between an obligation to a freshly widowed mother and the fiercely guarded anonymity of his expatriate existence: there is also his partner Maria and the baby his baby she is expecting. And Claire, the friend of his youth, who is now ready to love him. Michael’s hard-won emotional detachment seems to make it possible for him to continue indefinitely inflicting pain on those who care for him. But life has a way of catching up on even the most determined of fugitives.

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The Mermaids Singing by Lisa Carey
When Cliona leaves the Irish island of Inis Muruch for Boston, she dreams of a new life. But love and pain shape her destiny, and when she returns to the small island years later, in the place of her fulfilled dreams she has a fierce and beautiful daughter, Grace. The sea is a barrier to the tiny stretch of land that is Inis Muruch, but only when Grace swims there can she feel warm and free. It is Seamus who offers her his heat to end the damp cold which makes her feel waterlogged and cursed. Their love is shaped by a fear which makes her as terrified of losing him as she is of giving herself up. The island remains a prison to Grace and she slips away by night with her baby daughter, Grainne, disappearing like a mermaid sliding under the sea. At 15 Grainne returns to Inis Muruch with her grandmother, Cliona, repeating the journey her mother was forced to make years before. She endeavours to understand the choices made by the women who have gone before her and searches for the father who she cannon remember. Through the myth and mystery of the island and its language, Gainnne learns about the mermaids of Irish folklore who seek to escape from their lovers and return to the watery wilderness of the sea, leaving behind them the responsibility and pain that love brings. This warm and sensitive debut novel examines the patterns of love, resentment and forgiveness in the lives of three women torn between passion and duty, dream and reality.

The Catastrophist by Ronan Bennett
This is a novel of love and desire and the blinding effect, set in the Congo at a turning point for Africa. Expatriates loll about their pools in a colonial paradise soon to erupt into chaos; huge crowds are drawn to the charismatic independence leader, Patrice Lumumba and his rivals; one man sees the cracks appearing around him and struggles to hold on to his lover, his sanity, and ultimately his life. Gillespie, the outsider, is in Leopoldville for the beautiful Italian, Iries. He is desperate for her love; she is obsessed with the unfolding drama. In a world slipping out of control, gripped by disgust, fear and incomprehension, events threaten to overwhelm him as does his friendship with the amiable American, Stipe, with his canny driver, Auguste, and through everything Iries, always Iries. As the mess of corruption and injustice gives way to brutality and murder, Gillespie is finally forced to confront what is happening before his eyes. In subtle, haunting prose, the author captures the complex ricochet between the personal and the political, cruelty, lust and the erotic. This is a courageous novel; it achieves a refined sensibility which leaves the reader emotionally riven.

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Blood Ties by Jennifer Lash
Violet Farr is Irish, married to the ineffectual Cecil, a repressed homosexual. In a moment of joyless union the conceive a son, the absurd Lumsden, but they are incapable of showing him love. He himself is a ne’er do well and fathers an illegitimate child, Spencer, by a lost soul named Dolly, herself a refugee from an unhappy upbringing in a Surrey village. When the severely neglected, traumatised boy is dumped on Violet, his grandmother, he becomes the focus for all the despair and disappointment that her son had loaded upon her. This is a compelling novel, precise and vivid, a novel which probes every exposed nerve of family feeling and family hell. It is a harrowing story but ultimately a profoundly inspiring one.

A Sort of Homecoming by Robert Cremins
Iremonger has arrived back in Dublin for Christmas and centre-stage (he’d have it no other way) in your imagination. A young man on an anti-mission, he has spent the last six months blowing his revered grandfather’s legacy on a transcontinental lost weekend. Armed with his trusty leather jacket ‘Nico’ a virtual second skin, he’s intent on having fun and isn’t going to let the ‘bully boys of existence’ (the past the future) push him around. But after a season of excess, it turns out to be the present that finally catches up with him. A novel of ‘mad pinters’ and priests, roomkeepers and ravers, ‘semtex’ and sensibility, this novel is as much about the old truths as it is about the new Ireland.

Unusual Suspects: Twelve Radical Clergy by Denis Carroll
This book is a fascinating study of radical clergymen in Ireland from different traditions and varying times. In ten chapters the reader meets Presbyterian, Catholic and Church of Ireland clergy who spoke for inclusion of all people in an Ireland free of sectarian hatreds and economic oppression. They spoke fearlessly and always at a tangent to prevailing orthodoxies. Their honesty incurred trouble for themselves not only with civil authorities but with vested interests in their churches. Their thought ranges from theology to social analysis. Their common bond is a radical diagnosis of our long-standing hostilities and courage to articulate that diagnosis. Many of them ordered an Irish ‘political theology’ every bit as radical as liberation theology today. The book accompanies the reader through dramatic periods of Irish history the United Irishmen, the relapse into sectarian difficulties of the early 18th century, the Famine, the re-emergence of Irish separatism from the late 1860s, and the foundations of a partitioned Ireland. It draws on academic history while playing full attention to local traditions and the insights of modern political theology.

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Uniforms of 1798-1803 by F. Glenn Thompson
This book describes and illustrated the arms and uniforms which were a familiar part of the Irish scene during the 1798 rebellion and its aftermath. Insurgents, the French, Regulars, Yeomanry, Militia, Fencibles, Artillery, etc. officers and men are depicted in meticulously detailed full colour illustrations.

Blasket Memories: The Life of an Irish Island Community edited by Padraig Tyers
This book presents a powerful insight into the lives of those who lived on the Blasket Island and describes how the island was evacuated in 1953 when their numbers decreased to a point where they could no longer survive as a separate community. The first part of the book is based on the writings of Sean O Criomhthain. He vividly describes the immense difficulties experienced by the fishing community at the hands of the landlords and bailiffs, as they battled with the harsh elements. Two things helped to sustain them: their firm faith in God and their support for one another. They were great lovers of music and some even made their own instruments. Sean tells with great glee of the coming of the first gramophone to the island. The second part of the book consists of interviews with Sean O Criomhthain; Nora Ni Sheaghda, a mainlander who taught for many years in the island school; Sean O Guithin, who was one of the last group to leave the island at Christmas 1953; and Cait Bean Ui Naoilchairain, widow of Muiris O Suilleabhain, the author of Twenty Years a Growing.

Scarecrow by Sean Lysaght
A central group of poems in this collection adjusts the perspective of his earlier field notes and nature sketches and explores questions of individual integrity through the motif of the scarecrow. Other poems recharge familiar landscapes with images from natural history and science. There is an emphasis throughout on freeing feelings and objects from the cumber of the past, while keeping faith with those locations where ‘things are sung.’

Voice of Rebellion: Carlow in 1798- The Autobiography of William Farrell edited by Roger McHugh with an introduction by Patrick Bergin
Years after the Rebellion of 1798, William Farrell set down his passionate and detailed eyewitness account of life in Carlow during that resonant time in Irish history. Now, to mark the bicentenary, actor Patrick Bergin has returned to his roots to bring this forgotten classic out of the shadows of the past. The reader walks with Farrell down the streets of Carlow in 1798 and listens to the many vivid voices of an Irish county town. The reader follows him through scenes of terror and suffering which surrounded the Rebellion a time when the scales of life and death could be tipped by the favour of a jailer, the mood of a militiaman or even the fashion of a haircut. This book is the untold story of Carlow in 1798 brought to life by a man who survived it.

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In the Season of the Daisies by Tom Phelan
One night in 1921 and IRA action goes horribly wrong, leaving young Willie Doolan dead. Set in an Irish village, the story of that fateful night unfolds through the distinct voices of each character: the schoolteacher, the butcher, the doctor, the shopkeeper, the priest, and Seanie Willie’s twin brother whose ghostlike presence serves as a constant reminder. In a direct and uncompromising style, the author conveys the town’s pain and loss, the power of evil, love’s redemption, and the toll of ancient animosities.

The Irish Americans: The Immigrant Experience by William Griffin
The powerful story of the 40 million Irish Americans, descendants of the 7 million who emigrated from Ireland to America over the last three decades, is a richly textured portrait of the struggles and triumphs of a proud and passionate people. This books tells the story of those 7 million Irish men, women and children who left their native land for a chance at a better life. Many went searching for the streets they had heard were paved with gold and found that not only were they not paved with gold, the streets were not paved at all. Not only did the Irish pave the roads, they built the railroads, the bridges, the canals, as well as many city skyscrapers. In the process, America learned to cope with the Irish and the Irish learned to cope with their new land. Over the last 150 years the Irish in America have made the transition from the ‘wretched refuse’ of America’s teeming shore to success in business, recognition in the realms of culture, and mastery in the world of politics. They made the transition from soldiers on the battlefield and players on the sports fields to fully involved and assimilated members of America’s mainstream society. Now, having achieved the goal of complete acceptance, they are rediscovering their roots, reclaiming their cultural heritage, and renewing their ties with a reborn Ireland. Through moving text and more than 200 extraordinary images, this book pays tribute to the Irish in America, their courage, their trials, and their triumphs. The book also includes a demonstration CD-ROM of the Family Tree Maker for Windows.

Crime and Poverty in Ireland edited by Ivana Bacik and Michael O’Connell
The relationship between poverty, crime and sentencing is a controversial topic of debate. The four outstanding essays in this book make a significant contribution to existing research on the links between crime and poverty and will provide a basis for informed discussion on the development of public policy of criminal justice. This book seeks to demonstrate the way in which economic factors underpin the workings of the criminal justice system at every level. It also shows the impact of poverty on patterns of offending in Ireland.

The Wake by Tom Murphy
The most recent play by one of Ireland’s most gifted playwrights which premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in January, 1998. It tells the story of Vera O’Toole, alone, adrift and living dangerously in New York where she survives as a call girl. But she has a sustaining thought, a dream. She is not alone, she feels, because she has a family in Ireland; she belongs; indeed, some day she may even become worthy of that family. Now, as the story begins, she returns home to Ireland to pay her respects to her dead and beloved grandmother and to discover her dream, her sustaining thought, turning into a nightmare.

An Unusual Diplomat: A Biography of W.T. Dobrzynski by Krystyna Dobrynska-Cantwell
Waclaw Tadeusz Dobrzynski was born a Pole under Russian rule in Kiev in 1884. His early career covered Law, the Army, journalism, and was followed by a late entry into the Diplomatic Service of the fledgling Polish Republic. He arrived in Ireland in 1929 as one of the earliest diplomats and served as Consul General until 1954. This period covered the growing pains of the Irish Republic, the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, WW II, and he continued to represent the Polish Government in exile in the post-war period. He worked towards promoting the Irish Polish relationship through culture, sport and trade; he wrote and lectured widely on the parallel histories and cultures of the two nations. His life reflects the changing political circumstances of the two countries. This author, his daughter, has researched this book in Ireland, England and Poland and has utilised a wide variety of sources to show many aspects of his unusual life. This book is an essential source of Irish Diplomatic History.

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From Sophie to Sonia: A History of Women’s Athletics by Noel Henry
This book is a unique record of the development and progress of Irish women athletes and a fitting tribute to those who strode, often in the face of apathy and prejudice, to pursue and perfect the sport they loved and believed in. As you read this fascinating history, with is record of courage, tenacity, success, failure and shining talent, be thankful that the author himself a former outstanding athlete and coach had the patience and enthusiasm to explore and trace the path from the early days of local trial and tribulation to the modern glories of Irish women athletes.

The State of Ireland by Arthur O’Connor edited by James Livesey
Arthur O’Connor was the most important conduit between French republicanism and Irish political radicalism in the late 1790s. His ‘State of Ireland’, published in 1798, created a distinctively Irish language of radical democracy out of French sources, by fusing them with the local political tradition and Scottish political economy. O’Connor brought to the revolutionary movement of the 1790s a mind hones on the ideas of Adam Smith ideas that might not seem revolutionary today, but that had radical implications as adapted by O’Connor and applied to the bizarre political economy of 18th century Ireland. What his work reveals to is a breadth of vision within the United Irishmen and the novelty of their intervention in Irish political culture. O’Connor’s text deserves to find a place in the canon of classic political text that have constructed and made possible, or even imaginable, Irish democracy.

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