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This site includes the postings from the Irish Aires email list. This includes a listing of Irish/Celtic events in the Houston area and other information that the Irish Aires radio program posts.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Read Ireland
Read Ireland Book News - Issue 299
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A History of Ulster by Jonathan Bardon
(Trade Paperback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 16.00 UK; 928 pages)
Dynamic and volatile, Ulster is brought to life in this
meticulously researched history spanning nine thousand years of
the politics, culture and economy of the province – the early
settlements; the Viking and Norman invasions; the plantations
and the Penal Laws; the rise of the United Irishmen and
Orangeism; the Act of Union; emigration and the Great Famine;
the linen industry and shipbuilding; the Home Rule crisis and
partition; the Second World War and the blitz; civil rights and
the turmoil of the Troubles.
Through a sensitive use of a wide range of sources –
contemporary letters and diaries, journals and newspapers,
official documents and maps – Jonathan Bardon, author of the
acclaimed Belfast: An Illustrated History, captures the energy
and the obstinacy of Ulster. Stunning in its scope and elegant
in its presentation, this is an authoritative and consistently
readable history of the region and its people.
---------------------------------
Heroic Option: The Irish in the British Army by Desmond and Jean
Brown
(Hardback; 40.00 Euro / 47.00 USD / 25.00 UK; 330 pages, with
photo insert)
It is a curious paradox that, while for many centuries there has
been deep antagonism between the British and the Irish, the
latter have fought the former's wars with exemplary courage and
tenacity. This has never been better demonstrated than when, as
a result of the Irish regiments' superb service in the South
African War (Boer War) at the end of the 19th Century, Queen
Victoria ordered the formation of the Irish Guards in 1900 as a
mark of the Nation's gratitude. Even after the trauma of
Partition, Irishmen continued to serve in Irish regiments in
large numbers and the tradition continued today. Indeed during
the Second World War a very significant number of the most
influential generals were of Irish extraction.
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Nationalism and the Irish Party: Provincial Ireland 1910-1916 by
Michael Wheatley
(Hardback; 70.00 Euro / 85.00 USD / 50.00 UK; 295 pages)
In this book, Michael Wheatley examines Irish politics in the
last years of the Union, before war and uprising transformed
Irish and British politics. Focusing particularly on the Irish
Party, he provides a detailed, scholarly analysis and challenges
the view that the party was doomed.
John Redmond's constitutional, parliamentary, Irish Party went
from dominating Irish politics to oblivion in just four years
from 1914-1918. The goal of limited Home Rule, peacefully
achieved, appeared to die with it. Given the speed of the
party's collapse, its death has been seen as inevitable. Though
such views have been challenged, there has been no detailed
study of the Irish Party in the last years of union with
Britain, before the world war and the Easter Rising transformed
Irish politics. Through a study of five counties in provincial
Ireland - Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon, Sligo, and Westmeath -
that history has now been written. Far from being 'rotten', the
Irish Party was representative of nationalist opinion and still
capable of self-renewal and change. However, the Irish
nationalism at this time was also suffused with a fierce
anglophobia and sense of grievance, defined by its enemies,
which rapidly came to the fore, first in the Home Rule crisis
and then in the war. Redmond's project, the peaceful attainment
of Home Rule, simply could not be realised.
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In the Company of William Hazlitt: Thoughts for the 21st Century
by Maurice Whelan
(Trade Paperback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 17.00 UK; 206 pages)
Hazlitt is presented here as a great investigator of the inner
world and as a precursor to Freud, but also as going beyond the
founder of psychoanalysis and anticipating modern developments
in that field.
The author argues strongly for Hazlitt to be taken seriously as
a thinker and writer of extraordinary relevance to our present
world, a true spirit for our age. In his own lifetime and since,
he was regarded as one of the greatest writers of prose in the
English language, yet he was a thorn in the side of the
establishment: opposing slavery, critical of Wordworth's poetry
glorifying war, defending civil liberties, arguing against the
British dispossession of Ireland and for Catholic Emancipation.
-------------------------------------
Conquering England: Ireland in Victorian London by Fintan Cullen
and R.F. Foster
(Trade Paperback; 20.00 Euro / 25.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 80 pages,
with 50 colour and black-and-white images)
Under the Union between Britain and Ireland in 1801, the two
countries were engaged in a relationship that was quarrelsome,
contentious and in many ways interdependent. Yet it also
provided a wider arena for certain ambitions in literature,
politics and the arts. Irish talent was exported to London in
the nineteenth century; by the turn of the twentieth it was
being imported back to an Ireland undergoing political
radicalisation and a cultural renaissance. This book, which
accompanies a National Portrait Gallery exhibition, explores the
Irish presence in London during the Victorian period, focusing
on prominent individuals including the writers Oscar Wilde, W.B.
Yeats and G.B. Shaw; theatrical impresarios such as Bram Stoker;
history painters such as Daniel Maclise; charismatic politicians
such as Charles Stewart Parnell and colourful journalists such
as T.P. O'Connor. Through these influential individuals, the
changing perspectives on Ireland that developed during the
second half of the nineteenth century are revealed.
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World War I: 1914-1918: Ireland’s Memorial Records (on CD-ROM)
compiled by the Committee of the Irish National War Museum
(CDROM; 100.00 Euro / 130.00 USD / 70.00 UK)
The objective of this volumes is to preserve the names of over
49,000 Irishmen who lost their lives fighting in the Great War,
World War I, 1914-1918. The collection was compiled by The
Committee of the Irish National War Memorial under the direction
of the Earl of Ypres. It is the most complete record known to
exist and was published in 1923.
This record is unique in many ways. Firstly, not only does it
record the names of the dead, it also records their rank,
regiment, date of death and regimental number. In most cases the
soldier’s county or place of birth and the place and date of
death are recorded. All 32 counties in Ireland lost men in the
Great War. More than 5,000 from Antrim, 4,800 from Dublin and
3,000 from Cork alone. Indeed it is likely that every village,
town and city in Ireland at the time was touched in some way by
the loss.
Beautiful artwork by the renowned Irish artist Harry Clarke
completes this unique production, as users can view high quality
scanned images from the original publication. Only one hundred
copies of the original publication were ever produced. It is
extremely rare.
Users can either search or browse the books, names and entries.
The CD also reproduces the original introduction from 1923, and
a new preface with plenty of statistic gathered while databasing
the collection. There is also a biography of Harry Clarke, with
information about his artwork over many years.
Every effort has been made to produce a high quality facsimile
of the original 8 volumes published in 1923, whilst also using
the technology available today to ease access to that
information and compile valuable statistics that will enrich our
understanding of Ireland’s place in the Great War.
This CD-ROM contains:
· All eight volumes of the original publication, with 3,177
pages
· Names of over 49,000 individuals who died, and all details
about them recorded in the original books
· 16 different page designs by Harry Clarke
· High qaulity scanned images of every page of the original
publication
· A beautifully designed DVD case incorporating the images of
Harry Clarke
· Help files and detailed introduction
System Requirements
PC
OS: Windows 98, SE, ME, NT4, 2000, XP or higher.
Processor: PII or above
Mac
OS: OSX
Power Macintosh 16Mb of available RAM
Browser
Supported browsers: Internet Explorer version 5.5 or above;
Netscape version 7.1 or above; Mozilla 1.7.3 or above; Firefox
1.0 or above; Safari Browser (default browser built into Mac)
Image Viewer
Alternatiff (available to download for free at
http://www.alternatiff.com)
Publishing Platform:
Lucene, HTML, Flash
-----------------------------------------
At Arm’s Length: Aristocrats in the Republic of Ireland by Anne
Chambers
(Hardback; 20.00 Euro / 26.00 USD / 14.00 UK; 210 pages)
Living in Ireland today, for the most part unobtrusively and
ignored By the greater Irish public, are the descendants of
Ireland's former ruling ascendancy. Some are directly descended
from Ireland's most ancient kings and chiefs, their ancestry
stretching back beyond history, others can claim an Irish
pedigree merely five-hundred years old. But By virtue of past
historical events and present perceptions they are, despite
their ancestry, regarded as being less Irish than the rest of
the Irish population.
The integration of the aristocratic order into the political and
social structures of the Republic of Ireland has taken longer
than elsewhere. Since Irish independence from Britain a gulf
existed between them and the rest of Irish society that was more
pronounced and fundamental than the mere social divide usually
found between aristocrat and commoner in other countries. In
Ireland the 'Us and Them' mentality that existed between Irish
aristocrats and the rest of the population has more to do with
history and politics than with social status, privilege or
material wealth.
At Arm's Length traces the historical and political evolution
that lead to this division. In an innovative and unique
approach, the author Anne Chambers elicits the views of 14
present-day Irish chiefs and peers who live and work in the
Republic of Ireland, on that historical evolution, as well as on
a range of social and political issues that shape their sense of
place and belonging in the Ireland of the 21st century. She also
examines how the rest of the Irish population and the State they
created contributed to keeping the most ethnic class amongst
them at arm's length.
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New in Paperback This Week:
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Anyone But Him by Sheila O’Flanagan
(Paperback; 10.00 Euro / 13.00 USD / 7.00 UK; 600 pages)
Andie and her sister Jin have never seen eye to eye. Andie
doesn't envy Jin her marriage to a wealthy businessman, while
Jin can't believe Andie's happy with her man-free existence (if
only she knew!). But when their widowed mother Cora comes back
from a Caribbean cruise with more than just a suntan, Andie and
Jin are united in horror. Who is this gorgeous young man who's
swept their mother off her feet? What the women really need is a
friend to set the world to rights with – but can they be friends
with each other?
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Highlights from the Previous Issue:
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Read Ireland Book News - Issue 298
The Atlantean Irish: Ireland’s Oriental and Maritime Heritage by
Bob Quinn
(Trade Paperback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 272 pages,
with full colour and black-and-white illustrations throughout)
Irish identity is best understood from a maritime perspective.
For eight millennia the island has been a haven for explorers,
settlers, colonists, navigators, pirates and traders, absorbing
goods and peoples from all points of the compass. The reduction
of the islanders to the exclusive category 'Celtic' has
persisted for three hundred years, and is here rejected as
impossibly narrow. No classical author ever described Ireland's
inhabitants as 'Celts', and neither did the Irish so describe
themselves until recent times. The islanders' sea-girt culture
has been crucially shaped by Middle Eastern as well as by
European civilizations, by an Islamic heritage as well as a
Christian one. The Irish language itself has antique roots
extended over thousands of years' trading up and down the
Atlantic seaways.
Over the past twenty years Bob Quinn has traced archaeological,
linguistic, religious and economic connections from Egypt to
Arann, from Morocco to Newgrange, from Cairo and Compostela to
Carraroe. Taking Conamara sean-nos singing and its Arabic
equivalents, and a North African linguistic stratum under the
Irish tongue, Quinn marshalls evidence from field archaeology,
boat-types, manuscript illuminations, weaving patterns,
mythology, literature, art and artefacts to support a
challenging thesis that cites, among other recent studies of the
Irish genome, new mitochondrial DNA analysis in the Atlantic
zone from north Iberia to west Scandinavia.
The Atlantean Irish is a sumptuously illustrated, exciting,
intervention in Irish cultural history. Forcefully debated, and
wholly persuasive, it opens up a past beyond Europe, linking
Orient to Occident. What began as a personal quest-narrative
becomes a category-dissolving intellectual adventure of
universal significance. It is a book whose time has arrived.
-----------------------------------
The Honan Chapel: A Golden Vision edited by Virginia Teehan and
Elizabeth Sincott Heckett
(Hardback; 60.00 Euro / 80.00 USD / 40.00 UK; 288 pages, full
colour illustrations throughout)
The Honan Chapel, at University College Cork, consecrated in
1916 was a unique concept, reflecting in both its architecture
and decoration every element of the Irish arts and crafts
movement. It was founded in the belief that it is essential for
a University College to meet both the spiritual and academic
needs of students. Associated with this was the belief that the
chapel’s design must be truly Irish in inspiration and
representative of early Irish ecclesiastical art. Internally the
extraordinary collection of chapel furnishings, textiles,
vestments etc. was conceived and executed at the height of the
early twentieth century Celtic revival and is a unique
expression of that renaissance. It contains items in silver and
wood, cloth, paper and stone, providing a valuable and unique
record of the best of Irish ecclesiastical art at the time, and
is a remarkable expression of the Irish Arts and Crafts
movement.
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Dialogues: Women Artists from Ireland by Katy Deepwell
(Trade Paperback; 28 Euro / 33.00 USD / 19.00 UK; 194 pages,
with illustrations throughout)
This illuminating book brings together interviews with
contemporary women artists whose work was exhibited in Ireland
in the 1990s - a significant decade for art in Ireland,
particularly for women artists. While the artists interviewed
live and work internationally, each has an individual and
complex relationship to Ireland, responding in their work to its
landscapes, stories, language and histories and engaging with a
wide range of concerns including motherhood and family,
sexuality, and dislocation. An equally wide range of media are
used, from painting to installation; from performance to public
art projects. Artists interviewed: Orla Barry, Maud Cotter,
Pauline Cummins, Rita Duffy, Frances Hegarty, Jaki Irvine,
Sandra Johnston, Sharon Kelly, Alice Maher, Susan MacWilliam,
Mary McIntyre, Alanna O'Kelly, Catherine Owens, Vivienne Roche,
Anne Tallentire and Louise Walsh.
-----------------------------------
The Vanishing Kingdoms: Irish Chiefs and their Families by
Walter J.P. Curley
(Trade Paperback; 22.50 Euro / 28.00 USD / 18.00 UK; 190 pages,
with and black-and-white illustrations throughout)
Vanishing Kingdoms combines an account of aristocracy and its
history in Ireland with an interview-based description of twenty
recognized Irish chiefs of the name and their family
backgrounds. Three of them, The O'Brien, O'Conor Don and The
O'Neill, have legitimate claims to high kingship; all are
descendants of territorial kings and sub-kings. For the most
part shorn of their privileges and territories in a
democratized, socially fluid Ireland of the twenty-first
century, as a group the chiefs exercise a continuing fascination
and a living link to the past, leaving an imaginative yet
tangible mark on the Irish landscape.
The families are grouped by province ULSTER: The O'Neill; The
O'Dogherty; The O'Donnell; MacDonnell; The Maguire MUNSTER: The
O'Brien; The O'Callaghan; The O'Carroll; The O'Donovan; The
O'Donoghue; The McGillycuddy; The O'Grady; The O'Long LEINSTER:
The Fox; The O'Morchoe; The MacMorrough Kavanagh CONNACHT:
O'Conor Don; The MacDermot; The O'Kelly; The O'Rorke
Through the unfolding diorama of these individual family
stories, Vanishing Kingdoms gives an enriching view of Irish
history and society. Contemporary portraits of the current
chiefs, photographs and engravings of their dwellings, past and
present, complement a vivid narrative.
-------------------------------------
A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 edited by
Brian Shaffer
(Hardback; 125.00 Euro / 150.00 USD / 80.00 UK; 580 pages)
A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 serves as
an extended introduction and reference guide to the British and
Irish novel between the close of World War II and the turn of
the millennium. The Companion embraces the full range of this
rich and heterogeneous subject, covering: specific British and
Irish novels and novelists ranging from Samuel Beckett to Salman
Rushdie: particular subgenres such as the feminist novel and the
postcolonial novel: overarching cultural, political and literary
trends such as screen adaptations and the literary prize
phenomenon. All the essays are informed by current theoretical
debates, but are designed to be accessible to non-specialists.
The volume as a whole gives readers a sense of the vitality with
which the contemporary novel continues to be discussed.
------------------------------------
Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel 1890-1930 by Daniel
Schwarz
(Paperback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 16.00 UK; 300 pages)
Daniel R. Schwarz has studied and taught the modern British
novel for decades and now brings his impressive erudition and
critical acuity to bear in this insightful study of the major
authors and novels of the first half of the twentieth century.
After a compelling introduction outlining his method and a
substantial first chapter establishing the intellectual,
cultural and literary contexts in which the modern British novel
was produced, Schwarz turns to close reading of modernist
masterworks. He shows how Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Conrad's
Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and
The Rainbow, Joyce's Dubliners and Ulysses, Woolf's Mrs.
Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Forster's A Passage to India
form essential components in a modernist cultural tradition
which includes the visual arts.Without lapsing into jargon,
Schwarz's work takes account of recent developments in theory
and cultural studies. His persuasive study will not only be
invaluable to students and teachers, but will also be of
interest to the general reader. (Also available in Hardback at
80 Euro)
-------------------------------------------
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