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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, September 17, 2005
Read Ireland
Read Ireland Book News – Issue 320
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Sinn Fein: A Century of Struggle introduced by Gerry Adams
(Large Format Paperback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 250
pages, with black-and-white illustrations throughout)
This book marks the centenary of Sinn Féin. Just published it is
a unique record of 100 years of struggle. This book tells the
story of the Sinn Féin century in the words of Republicans
themselves over the ten decades since the organisation was
established. Lavishly illustrated, the book is one of the
centrepieces of Sinn Féin’s centenary programme.
Introduced by Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, the book traces
the political history of Ireland from 1905 to 2005. It moves
from the founding of Sinn Féin to the 1916 Easter Rising, the
Black and Tan War, the Partition of Ireland and the Civil War.
It speaks with the voice of Republicans in the subsequent years
of what James Connolly rightly predicted would be the ‘Carnival
of Reaction’ North and South. It gives an insight in the Border
Campaign of the 1950s.
It records the struggle of Republicans through the Civil Rights
Movement, the collapse of Unionist one-party rule, internment,
Bloody Sunday and the long and tragic war. It reflects popular
resistance to British rule, the heroism of prisoners,
culminating in the hunger strikes, and the emergence of Sinn
Féin as a strong all-Ireland political party - despite all the
efforts of its opponents. Finally it brings us to the peace
process and looks forward to the Ireland of Equals now being
built by Sinn Féin.
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Baptised in Blood: The Formation of the Cork Brigade of the
Irish Volunteers 1913-1916 by Gerry White and Brendan O’Shea
(Large Format Paperback; 15.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 128
pages, with photos and illustrations throughout)
The euphoria that surrounded the formation of the Irish
Volunteers in Dublin in 1913 captured the imagination of the
country and a series of similar meetings were organised for
other locations throughout Ireland. In Cork a public meeting
took place in City Hall on Sunday evening, 14 December 1913.
After a very contentious meeting over 500 men enlisted in the
new organisation and were constituted as 'The Cork City Corps'
of the Irish Volunteers. The fragile unity achieved within the
ranks of this countrywide Volunteer movement was shattered by
the outbreak of the First World War. Thousands of their number
set off to serve with great distinction in the tenth and
sixteenth divisions of the British army. The more militant
minority, of whom initially there remained only 12,000, refused
to follow suit, and dominated by the IRB, they retained the
title of 'Irish Volunteers' (Oglaig na hEireann), and set about
the daunting task of rebuilding an entire organisation.
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Ireland and the European Union: Nice, Enlargement and the Future
of Europe edited by Michael Holmes
(Large Format Paperback; 22.00 Euro / 28.00 USD / 15.00 UK; 206
pages)
This book analyses Ireland's relationship with the European
Union in the wake of Ireland's shock "No" vote to the Treaty of
Nice and the major changes in the EU since enlargement; It is
the first book to examine the "No" vote in detail, and to look
at Ireland's engagement with the issues of enlargement and the
negotiation of the draft constitution; Leading academics from
Ireland and the UK have combined to provide a thought-provoking
book which will be invaluable to anyone interested in
contemporary Irish politics and economics, particularly for
those interested in the issues of enlargement, the debate about
the future of Europe and the relationship between the Union and
its member states; It is the first book to analyse the Nice
referendums in detail, with chapters exploring opposition to
European integration in Ireland and the patterns of public
opinion on integration; The book provides an overall assessment
of the relationship between Ireland and the European Union
-----------------------------------
House of Memories by Alice Taylor
(Large Format Paperback; 15.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 280
pages)
A novel of rural Ireland in the early 1960s, continuing the
story of two neighbouring farms and their feuding families begun
in Alice Taylor's earlier works. Following his brutish father's
unlamented death, young Danny Conway strives to rescue the
family farm from ruin, finding help in an unexpected source.
Other challenges face the local community, which already has
little to offer young people and now it finds that it is
threatened with the loss of its school.
The new novel from the bestselling author of The Woman of the
House A story of love for the land and of the passions and
jealousies it can inspire. A moving story, too, of bereavement
and grief. No one knows the warp and weft of country life as
Alice Taylor does, and she has a unique ability to capture its
rhythms and cadences. Following his brutish father's unlamented
death, young Danny Conway strives to rescue the family farm from
ruin; when all seems hopeless, help comes from the most
unexpected quarter.
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Booking Passage: We Irish & Americans by Thomas Lynch
(Hardback; 19.00 Euro / 24.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 300 pages)
In February of 1970, Thomas Lynch, aged twenty-one, bought a
one-way ticket to Ireland. He landed in the townland of Moveen,
at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the thatched
cottage that his great-grandfather - another Thomas Lynch - had
left late in the nineteenth century with a one-way ticket to
America. Tommy and Nora Lynch, his elderly, unmarried, distant
cousins welcomed the young American 'home'. In the words of the
author, 'it changed my life'. He inherited the 'home place' when
Nora died in 1992. In the three decades since that first landing
and in dozens of return trips to Moveen, Lynch learned to look
for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the
local parish; to find, as Montaigne wrote, 'the whole of Man's
estate' in every man. Lynch's poems and essays, widely published
around the world, have made known the debt he owes to Ireland
and the Irish. Booking Passage is part travelogue, part cultural
study, part memoir and elegy, part guidebook for what Lynch
calls 'fellow pilgrims' working their way through their own and
the larger histories.
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County Donegal Railways Companion by Roger Crombleholme
(Large Format Paperback; 23.00 Euro / 29.00 USD / 16.00 UK; 112
pages, with black-and-white illustrations throughout)
An illustrated history with scale drawings of locomotives,
railcars and wagons featured on one of Irelands most popular
narrow gauge railways. A book for the railway modeller and
railway historian alike.
----------------
Available Again:
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Michael Collins: A Biography by Tim Pat Coogan
(Paperback; 20.00 Euro / 26.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 510 pages, with
black-and-white photo insert)
When the Irish nationalist Michael Collins signed the
Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, he observed to Lord
Birkenhead that he may have signed his own death warrant. In
August 1922 that prophecy came true when Collins was ambushed,
shot and killed by a compatriot, but his vision and legacy lived
on. This biography presents the life of a man whose idealistic
vigour and determination were matched by his political realism
and organizational abilities. The author's previous books
include "Ireland Since the Rising", "On the Blanket" and "The
IRA".
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The Day Michael Collins was Shot by Meda Ryan
(Paperback; 10.00 Euro / 13.00 USD / 7.00 UK; 215 pages)
Solves the mystery surrounding the ambush and killing of Michael
Collins.
The author Meda Ryan drawing on eye-witness accounts never
before published, painstakingly reconstructs, in
minute-by-minute detail, the last four days of Michael Collins's
life and follows, mile by mile, his fatal journey through his
home county of Cork.
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Concise History of Ireland by Sean Duffy
(Large Format Paperback; 17.00 Euro / 22.50 USD / 12.00 UK; 250
pages, with full colour photos, maps and illustrations
throughout)
This attractive one-volume survey tells the story of Ireland
from earliest times to the present. The text is complemented by
200 illustrations, including maps, photographs and diagrams.
Sean Duffy, the general editor of the bestselling Atlas of Irish
History , has written a text of exceptional clarity. Duffy
stresses the enduring themes of his story: the long cultural
continuity; the central importance of Ireland's relationships
with Britain and mainland Europe; and the intractability of the
ethnic and national divisions in modern Ulster. As a specialist
in medieval Irish history, he gives the earlier period its due
treatment - unlike most such surveys - thus introducing these
recurring themes at an early stage.
-----------------
New in Paperback
-----------------
Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy: An Irish Writer in New
York by Angela Bourke
(10.00 Euro / 13.00 USD / 7.00 UK; 330 pages)
The first book about Maeve Brennan, the recently rediscovered
New Yorker writer from Ireland, who wrote like an angel, and
looked like a fashion model, but became homeless in Manhattan in
the 1970s and died forgotten in 1993. Born in Dublin in 1917 to
politically active parents, Maeve Brennan's childhood in Ireland
was moulded by the cultural ideologies of nationalism and lit by
the creative energy of the Abbey and Gate theatres. She was
seventeen when her father was appointed to the Irish Legation in
Washington DC, where he was Irish Minister throughout World War
II. Maeve wrote fashion copy at Harper's Bazaar until 1949, when
William Shawn invited her to join The New Yorker. Tiny,
impeccably groomed, and devastatingly witty, in William
Maxwell's words, 'to be around her was to see style being
invented'. Her richly textured fiction criticism and 'Talk of
the Town' pieces, published in the 1950s and '60s, during The
New Yorker's most influential period, offer unsparing portraits
of the Ireland she had left and the America she inhabited. As
this richly researched and wide-ranging book makes clear, Maeve
Brennan's effect on the people who met her, her eye for human
behaviour, clothing and domestic settings, her memory of home
and her courageous life as a woman alone in metropolitan America
make her an icon of the twentieth century.
------------------------------------
Highlights from the Previous Issue:
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An Irish History of Civilization: Volume One by Don Akenson
(Hardback; 35.00 Euro / 42.00 USD / 25.00 UK; 826 pages)
St Patrick catching sight of Ireland for the first time as he is
taken there as a prisoner...Joyce and Yeats eating sticky buns
in a Dublin cafe...There has never before been an Irish history
book remotely like this one, composed as a vast mosaic of
incidents, encounters and vignettes. It is not so much a
'history of Irish civilization' as an 'Irish history of
civilization'. In telling a wide range of stories about the
Irish everywhere this historical-fictional account of the Irish
peoples around the globe from the time of Christ to 1969 opens
up the really big issues - the relationship between the minute
particulars and the larger patterns which gradually become
apparent. The stories themselves are by turns funny, acerbic,
ironic, score-settling - never quite what they seem at face
value. They are also deeply informed by the author's vast
knowledge of Ireland, its history and its diaspora. For once the
hyperbole is true - after this book, Irish history will never be
the same again.
------------------------------------
The Squad and the Intelligence Operations of Michael Collins by
T. Ryle Dwyer
(Paperback; 13.00 Euro / 17.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 270 pages)
In 1919, Michael Collins conceived of a scheme to knock out the
eyes and ears of the British Administration at Dublin Castle by
undermining and terrorising the police so that the British would
react blindly and drive the Irish people into the arms of the
Irish Republican Army. The Bureau of Military History
interviewed those involved in this scheme in the early 1950s
with the assurance that the material would not be published in
their lifetimes. A few of the contributions were made available
by the families of those involved, but the bulk of them have
only recently been released. This the first book to make use of
those interviews. It makes fascinating, almost unique reading,
because they contain first-hand descriptions in which men
speaking candidly of their involvement in killing selected
people at close range. As a result it throws a considerable
amount of new light on the activities of the Squad and the
intelligence operations of Michael Collins.
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Dictionary of Munster Women Writers, 1800-2000 edited by Tina
O’Toole
(Hardback; 30.00 Euro / 36.00 USD / 24.00 UK; 325 pages)
The subjects range from well-known figures like Kate O'Brien or
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, to a host of forgotten or neglected
writers, singers or storytellers, and some brought to public
notice for the first time. The Dictionary interprets "writers"
very broadly, and includes unpublished diaries, journals, and
letters, together with plays, documentaries, film-scripts and
journalism, cookery books and manuals, as well as fiction and
poetry. Many of the Irish language entries relate to
contributions to the folk and song traditions rather to more
conventional forms of writing. The project has been devised, in
part, as a feminist recovery of women's writing, especially over
periods when the surrounding society and culture had a
distinctly patriarchal character (and women, for example, often
wrote under male pen-names or anonymously), but it also offers a
rich source work for those interested in local or regional
identities, and a wide range of literary issues and figures. In
conjunction with (and profoundly influenced by) the Field-Day
Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Womens' Writing and
Traditions, this Dictionary will stimulate further research and
inquiry and be an indispensable source book for many decades to
come.
-----------------------------------
Dublin: A Cultural and Literary History by Siobhan Kilfeather
(Paperback; 19.00 Euro / 27.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 300 pages)
This book is a history of Dublin, with a remarkable feel for the
way the past is embodied in bridges and alleyways, sculpture and
slums. But in classical Dublin manner it also ambles and
diverges, pausing to illuminate the reader about a whole range
of subjects from duels to theatres, maternity hospitals to
prisons, the Book of Kells to Bono, Politics, industry,
painting, architecture, feminism, poetry, famine, armed
insurrection: these are a mere handful of the topics explored in
this extraordinarily rich account. Like all the finest surveys,
it combines a deep affection for its subject with an astutely
critical eye. There are a good many guides to contemporary
Dublin, and a shelf-load of histories of the place; but to
combine the two, as Kilfeather has done in the spirit of this
series, is a rare achievement.
--------------------------------
Celtic Angels by Donald McKinney
(Trade Paperback; 17.00 Euro / 23.00 USD / 11.00 UK; 286 pages)
Top Celtic expert reveals how to forge a long-term,
life-changing relationship with your own Celtic angel. Angels
have long been a source of protection, comfort, wisdom and joy,
providing guidance and helping us to discover the connection
between our day-to-day existence and our spiritual needs. For
the ancient Celts, angels were a part of everyday life and were
often thought of as a confidant, companion and counseller all in
one. These powers of companionship, guidance and inspiration are
needed now more than ever in our demanding modern world. In this
illuminating guide, Donald McKinney reveals the secrets of the
spiritual world inhabited by the Celtic angels, their role in
the lives of the ancient Celts, and how to seek out and work
with your personal angelic guide. Everyone's angel is waiting to
help - with anything from day-to-day problems, to accessing your
ancestors, to exploring your personal spiritual path through
life.
-------------------------------
The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter
(Paperback; 20.00 Euro / 26.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 884 pages)
In 1900 Ireland was a restless, impoverished, neglected corner
of the British Empire. By 2000 it had become the 'Celtic Tiger'.
How did this happen? And what of those who lived through it? In
the first comprehensive account of Ireland in the twentieth
century, Diarmaid Ferriter draws together the complex threads
that make up Ireland's story- from the high drama of its
politics, to the 'hidden pasts' drawn from memoirs and
previously unused sources; from the bitter struggles over the
North to religion, literature, family and football.
----------------------------------
An Atlas of Irish History by Ruth Dudley Edwards
(Large Format Paperback; 23.00 Euro / 29.00 USD / 15.00 UK; 300
pages)
The history of Ireland and its people is one of incredible
richness and variety. Combining over 100 beautifully crafted
maps, charts and graphs with a narrative packed with facts and
information, An Atlas of Irish History provides coverage of the
main political, military, economic, religious and social changes
that have occurred in Ireland and among the Irish abroad over
the past two millennia. Ruth Dudley Edwards uses the combination
of thematic narrative and visual aids to examine and illustrate
issues such as: the Viking invasions of Ireland the Irish in
Britain pre- and post-famine agriculture population change
twentieth-century political affiliations. This new third edition
has been comprehensively revised and updated to include coverage
of the many changes that have occurred in Ireland and among its
people overseas. Taking into consideration the main issues that
have developed since 1981, and adding a number of new maps and
graphs, this new edition also includes an informative and
detailed section on the troubles that have been a feature of
Irish life since 1969.
------------------------------------
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