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Read Ireland Book Reviews, July 1998
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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