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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.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Read Ireland
Read Ireland Book Reviews – Issue 341
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Bobby Sands: Nothing But an Unfinished Song by Denis O’Hearn
(Large Paperback; 20.00 Euro / 25.00 USD / 14.00 UK; 434 pages)
At seventeen, Bobby Sands was interested in music, girls and
soccer.Ten years later, he led his fellow prisoners on a protest
that grabbed the world's attention.Bobby Sands turned
twenty-seven on hunger strike, after spending almost nine years
in prison because of his activities as a member of the Irish
Republican Army.When he died on May 5, 1981, on the sixty-sixth
day of his hunger strike against repressive conditions in
Northern Ireland's H-Block prisons, parliaments across the world
stopped for a minute's silence in his honour.Nelson Mandela
followed his example and led a similar hunger strike in South
Africa.Bobby Sands' remarkable life and death have made him the
Irish Che Guevara.He is an enduring figure of resistance whose
life has inspired millions around the world.But until the
publication of this book, nothing has adequately explored the
motivation of the hunger strikers, nor recreated this period of
history from within the prison cell.Denis O'Hearn's powerful
biography, which contains an enormous amount of new material
based on primary research and interviews, illuminates for the
first time this enigmatic, controversial and heroic figure.
-------------------------------------
The Provisional IRA in England: The Bombing Campaign 1973-1997
by Gary McGladdery
(Large Paperback; 30.00 Euro / 36.00 USD / 24.00 UK; 272 pages)
In this revealing and fascinating account, the impact of the
Provisional IRA's bombing campaign in Britain on both British
government policy towards Northern Ireland and the internal
politics of the republican movement, are examined in detail. The
book highlights the early thinking of the British government and
draws on recently released public records from 1939, 1973 and
1974. It makes extensive use of television documentary footage
to offer a broader analysis. The book also examines republican
rationale behind the campaign, the reasoning behind the use of
particular tactics and the thinking behind atrocities, such as
the Birmingham bombings. Using a range of new evidence, the book
highlights the bankruptcy of republican strategic thinking and
challenges the notion that successive British governments
appeased republicans because of the threat of bombs in London.
The analysis of the campaign is placed within the wider context
of the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland as well as the
history of republican violence in England dating back to the
nineteenth century.
----------------------------------------
The Northern IRA and the Early Years of Partition 1920-1922 by
Robert Lynch
(Large Paperback; 30.00 Euro / 36.00 USD / 24.00 UK; 246 pages)
The years 1920-22 constituted a period of unprecedented conflict
and political change in Ireland. It began with the onset of the
most brutal phase of the War of Independence and culminated in
the effective military defeat of the Republican IRA in the Civil
War. Occurring alongside these dramatic changes in the south and
west of Ireland was a far more fundamental conflict in the
north-east, a period of brutal sectarian violence which marked
the early years of partition and the establishment of Northern
Ireland. Almost uniquely, the IRA in the six counties were
involved in every one of these conflicts and yet, it can be
argued, was on the fringe of all of them. The period 1920-22 saw
the evolution of the organisation from peripheral curiosity
during the War of independence to an idealistic symbol for those
wishing to resolve the fundamental divisions within the Sinn Fein
movement, which developed in the first six months of 1922. The
story of the Northern IRA's collapse in the autumn of that year
demonstrated dramatically the true nature of the organisation
and how it was their relationship to the various protagonists in
these conflicts, rather than their unceasing, but fruitless war
against partition, that defined its contribution to the Irish
revolution.
----------------------------------------
Myths and Memories of the Easter Rising: Cultural and Political
Nationalism in Ireland by Jonathan Githens-Mazer
(Large Paperback; 30.00 Euro / 36.00 USD / 24.00 UK; 238 pages)
This book examines the political transformation and
radicalisation of Ireland between the outbreak of the First
World War, August, 1914, and Sinn Fein's landslide electoral
victory in December, 1918. It argues, through a novel
application of theories of ethno-symbolism and social movement
theory, that the myths, memories and symbols of the Irish nation
formed the basis for interpretation of the events of the Easter
Rising, and that this interpretation stimulated members of the
Irish nation to support radical nationalism. The book calls this
phenomenon the Cultural Trigger Point. Through an examination of
a variety of sources, the book traces, in particular, the impact
of the Great War on cultural and religious nationalism, and its
role in the rise of radical Irish nationalism.
-------------------------------------
The GPO and the Easter Rising by Kieth Jeffery
(Large Paperback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 222 pages)
All existing accounts of the GPO in 1916 concentrate on the
Volunteers who occupied the building on Easter Monday. But what
of those Dubliners and others who were working in the Post
Office that morning? Their experiences have been largely ignored
in all subsequent historiography. While not neglecting the
rebels, this book tells their story too, using hitherto
unpublished material drawn from the treasure-trove of documents
relating to the Rising held in the British Post Office Archives,
which has remained unexplored for ninety years and never before
exploited by historians. This material complemented with
further important unpublished material from the British National
Archives, as well as other vivid eyewitness accounts first
published shortly after the Rising. This book brings a
strikingly fresh perspective to the history of the Rising.
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A Destiny That Shapes Our Ends: Florence and Josephine
O’Donoghue’s War of Independence edited by John Borgonovo
(Large Paperback; 30.00 Euro / 36.00 USD / 24.00 UK; 252 pages,
with an 8-page black-and-white photo insert)
Historian and IRA leader Florence O'Donoghue describes his
experiences as head of intelligence in Cork city during the
Irish War of Independence (1919-1921). He candidly assesses the
leaders of this period, including Tomas MacCurtain, Sean
O'Hegarty, Terence MacSwiney and Michael Collins, and critically
examines the evolution of the Irish Volunteer citizen-soldiers.
He also details his wife, Josephine's role as the top IRA spy in
Cork's British Army headquarters, working for the rebels in
exchange for the return of her eldest son, lost in a bitter
custody battle with her in-laws. After O'Donoghue kidnapped the
child and reunited him with his mother, the two collaborators
eventually fell in love and were secretly married in the spring
of 1921. Forty years later, the couple presented their story to
their children in order to explain the family secret that had
haunted their domestic lives. The first part of the book is
O'Donoghue's and his wife's account of their activities in the
Anglo-Irish War, written in 1961; the second part is composed of
47 letters in diary form, written by O'Donoghue to his wife,
while he was 'on the run' during the last ten weeks of the
Anglo-Irish War, from May to July 1921. They provide a rare
snapshot of the daily life of fugitive IRA guerrillas.
----------------------------
New in Paperback This Week:
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Last of the Celts by Marcus Tanner
(Large Paperback; 20.00 Euro / 25.00 USD / 14.00 UK; 300 pages,
with 16 page black-and-white photo insert)
A cultural tour spanning the Celtic world from the Outer
Hebrides of Scotland to Brittany, and from Cape Breton to
Patagonia, this book sets out to find out what has happened to
the Celtic peoples in a world where pressure to conform to
Anglo-American culture has grown ever stronger.
Taking the form of a journey that starts in the wilds of
north-west Scotland, before proceeding through western Wales,
the Isle of Man, troubled Northern Ireland, the western seaboard
of the Irish Republic and The French region of Brittany, the
author weaves solid historical research into the language,
religion, music and customs of the peoples concerned with
first-hand encounters with a host of priests, ministers,
government officials, cultural activists, musicians and writers.
The author finds talk of a Celtic revival much misplaced, for
while the term "Celtic" is banded around as never more, largely
to suit the needs of commerce and tourism, the fragile cultures
the word actually refers to in the north-west of Britain,
Ireland and France are closer than ever before to extinction.
As the author discovers on his journey, the tide is going out at
different speeds in different places. While Welsh culture and
language are (relatively) robust, the rich culture of the
Bretons is heading for almost certain oblivion in a decade or
two at most, as relentless, centuries-long pressure to "be
French" reaches its climax.
Nor are the prospects much brighter for the small Celtic
communities in the New World. As the author travels from Cape
Breton in Canada to Patagonia in Argentina, he finds the once
sturdy communities of Gaelic and Welsh speakers facing exactly
the same threats of assimilation and ultimate disappearance. It
is a development that impoverishes us all.
--------------------------------------
Dublin’s Lost Heroines: Mammies and Grannies in a Vanished City
by Kevin C. Kearns
(Large Paperback; 15.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 330 pages)
Kevin C. Kearns, the acclaimed author of "Dublin Tenement Life"
and other oral histories, has now prepared a masterly work of
reminiscence, celebration and dignity. Based on interviews he
has conducted during annual visits to Dublin extending over
thirty years, he has drawn together a unique picture of women's
lives in the old Dublin slums. The slums of Dublin were among
the worst in Europe, rivalled only by Glasgow. Tall town houses,
originally built as elegant homes for the rich in the eighteenth
century, fell into the hands of avaricious and pitiless
landlords who filled them to bursting point with the desperate
and impoverished urban poor. Conditions were often unspeakably
vile, with massive over-crowding and utterly inadequate
sanitation. Yet out of these dreadful tenements, families were
reared, households kept together and human dignity maintained.
As with most impoverished societies, this was overwhelmingly the
work of women, the mammies and grannies of the Dublin slums whose
voices course through this remarkable book. They tell of how they
lived, of the difficulties they faced, of the grinding poverty,
the unemployment, the fecklessness of their men folk and always
of their heroic struggle to maintain the basic decencies of
human life in inhuman conditions.
-----------------------------------------
Available Again:
----------------
Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History by Kevin C. Kearns
(Large Paperback; 15.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 237 pages)
This book is based on the original oral histories of the
survivors of the old Dublin tenements. For nearly 150 years, the
wretched, squalid, tenements of Dublin were widely judged to be
the worst slums in all of Europe. By the 1930s, 6300 tenements
were occupied by almost 112,000 tenants. Some districts had 800
people to the acre, up to 100 occupants in one building and 20
family members crammed into a single tiny room. It was a hard
world of hunger, disease, high mortality, unemployment, heavy
drinking, prostitution and gang warfare. But despite their
hardships, the tenants poor enjoyed an incredibly close-knit
community life in which they found great security and, indeed,
happiness. As one policeman recalls from 50 years ago, they were
"extraordinarily happy for people who were so savagely poor".
This book captures their social life, their wit, their rousing
wakes and their incredible sense of community solidarity. In
their own words, the last of the tenement dwellers bear
testimony to the rich human mosaic of a bygone world. Their
accounts are sometimes tragic and emotionally wrenching but
equally they are an inspiring chronicle of struggle and
survival.
--------------------------------
New Edition:
------------
Tracing Your Irish Ancestors 3rd edition by John Grenham
(Large Paperback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 525 pages)
This third edition of "Tracing Your Irish Ancestors" retains the
three-part structure of earlier editions, but updates and
improves the material already included while adding new sources
which have emerged since publication of the second edition in
1998. The bibliographies - an important element of the book -
are more comprehensive than ever before. With the growing use of
Internet searches, the number of sources has grown dramatically
since the last edition. John Grenham has a specific chapter on
the Internet, with detailed references to online transcripts in
the source lists. In addition, the invaluable index has been
completely revised and updated to take account of the 35 per
cent increase in the extent of this new edition over the
previous one. 'A book which has already established itself as
the standard reference book for genealogical researchers,
professional or amateur, who are dealing with Irish sources' -
"Ireland of the Welcomes". ' The most authoritative book on the
subject' - Cara. 'Books on how to trace your Irish ancestors
pour from the presses. Here is a really worthwhile one,
comprehensive, clearly laid out and interesting to read.' -
"Books Ireland".
------------------------------------------
Highlights from the Previous Issue:
----------------------------------
Ludmila’s Broken English by DBC Pierre
(Trade Paperback; 14.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 11.00 UK; 317 pages)
DBC Pierre's second novel charts the unlikely meeting between
East and West that follows Ludmila Derev's appearance on a
Russian brides website. Determined to save her family from
starvation in the face of marauding Gnez troops, Ludmila's
journey into the world and womanhood is an odyssey of sour wit,
even sourer vodka, and a Soviet tractor probably running on
goat's piss. Thousands of miles to the West, the Heath twins are
separated after 33 years conjoined at the abdomen. Released for
the first time from an institution rumoured to have been founded
for an illegitimate child of Charles II, they are suddenly
plunged into a round-the-clock world churning with opportunity,
rowdy with the chatter of freedom, democracy, self-empowerment
and sex. A wild and raucous picaresque dripping with flavours of
British bacon and nasty Russian vodka, Ludmila's "Broken English"
is a tale of tango-ing twins on a journey into the unknown. A
ride so outrageously improbable it just may happen, DBC Pierre's
second novel confirms his place in the ranks of today's most
original storytellers.
--------------------------------------
An Irish History of Civilization volume Two by Don Akenson
(Hardback; 40.00 Euro / 50.00 USD / 30.00 UK; 696 pages)
'Some of these stories are accurate; all of them are true...' In
his "An Irish History of Civilization", Don Akenson, the world's
leading scholar of the Irish Dispora, fuses history and fiction
into a remarkable narrative of the people and their influence
around the globe. "An Irish History of Civilization" is about
the Irish at home and abroad, the great and the small, the noble
and the depraved, the saints and he sinners, adventures and
idealists. As Akenson follows his chosen people on their odyssey
around the globe, the lines between history and fiction become
irretrievably, beguilingly lost in the mists of time. Volume Two
begins with the Great Famine and goes on to show the Irish
adapting, improvising and innovating in Ireland and overseas -
in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia and South
Africa. The book ends by demonstrating the centrality of both
Catholic and Protestant Irish culture to the United States.
---------------------------------------
The Lightning Tree by P J Curtis
(Paperback; 16.00 Euro / 20.00 USD / 11.00 UK; 275 pages)
This is a haunting novel based on the life and voice of an old
"wise woman" and healer. The year is 1954. The place is the
Burren, a wild, rugged limestone region on the west coast of
Ireland. This is a world of old customs, strong traditions and
deeply-held religious and social values. It is also a pagan
place, of ghosts and spirits, old beliefs and superstitions. In
this time and place lives Mariah, an old woman of considerable
powers, the last of a long line of renowned healers. Some say
her power is a gift from God; others that it comes from the
devil, that she is a witch. In this unique novel a voice from
the past speaks with remarkable contemporary relevance. Mariah's
views are refreshingly alternative at a time when we may be
coming full circle to an appreciation of old healing arts and
the concept of contentment with a simpler life.
--------------------------------------
The Picture She Took by Fiona Shaw
(Hardback; 21.00 USD / 26.00 UK / 16.00 UK; 342 pages)
How far will a man go in war? And how far will a woman go to
bring him back? In a bombed-out village, on the Western Front,
Jude nurses the wounded in her cellar hospital. War is the
making of her, and she records all she can, taking photographs
of everything, capturing life in the midst of death. Survivor of
a very different conflict, Daniel has come home from Ireland a
haunted man. Signed up to the hated Black and Tans, he is
disfigured by a campaign he fought in but didn't understand. A
few years later an innocent photograph exposes an extraordinary
tale. A chance snapshot, two soldiers sharing a cigarette,
brings together Jude and Daniel and propels them on a strange
journey. People travel a long way from themselves in battle and
some never return. This searching, beautiful novel is about the
wars we wage against others and against ourselves; it is a
powerful story of memory, flight and desire.
--------------------------------------
Tell Me Your Secret by Deirdre Purcell
(Large Paperback; 15.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 11.00 UK; 342 pages)
A powerful and thought-provoking novel about women's lives from
the high-profile journalist and writer. An evocative and
dramatic novel told in the voices of two narrators: Violet, who
in 1944 is imprisoned in the tower of a rambling country house
by her family; and Claudine, a modern-day property negotiator
who becomes involved in handling the sale of the derelict
Whitecliff in 2004. Violet's story is of young innocent love for
a local lad taking an unfortunate twist, while Claudine is a
thoroughly twenty-first-century character: daughter of a loving
father with a less loving stepmother, she marries in haste after
her father's death, and is at a turning point in her life when
she starts to find out the true story of Violet. Is happiness a
possibility for these women in their separate and very different
worlds?
-----------------------------------
Pretending by Caroline Williams
(Large Paperback; 13.00 Euro / 16.00 USD / 9.00 UK; 390 pages)
Martina is in love with Cuan. Eleanor used to be in love with
Cuan. In fact, sooner or later, everyone falls for Cuan. But
Cuan knows he can't fall in love with anyone, and he wishes
people would stop looking for something he can't give. Now
Eleanor is on the verge of falling in love with someone who
isn't Cuan, but she still can't stop herself obsessing about
him. And Martina can't bring herself to fall out of love with
him either. Sooner or later Cuan is going to have to come clean
about why he won't do what comes naturally to everyone else. And
they're all going to have to learn that true love doesn't follow
any rules. "Pretending" is a tender and addictive story of love,
secrets, confused identities and learning to see
people for who they really are not what they pretend to be.
-------------------------------------
Object Lessons by Eavan Boland
(Paperback; 20.00 Euro / 25.00 USD / 14.00 UK; 272 pages)
'I have put this book together, not as a prose narrative is
usually constructed, but as a poem might be. In turnings and
returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and
re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and
hopefully becomes a sort of cadence.' In "Object Lessons" Eavan
Boland meditates on womanhood in the specific places and times
of her life. She engages, in a scrupulous and evocative prose,
the issues of nationhood as well, clearing a space within
Ireland where to be a woman and a poet has seemed in the past a
contradiction in terms. The book functions in her work as
Wordsworth's "Prelude" does in his, though Boland does not allow
herself the luxury of rapture: to say no more or less than she
means, she focuses on particulars, on 'obstinate details' that
contain and represent larger meaning, connection and force. The
autobiography here is not of a confessional kind: the facts
which connect with other voices, other lives, matter. What the
London Review of Books called Boland's 'radical but
undoctrinaire feminism' informs all the related meditations in
"Object Lessons", an enabling document of our time. Unease with
Modernism, a concern with the erotic in time, and at every point
a sense of continuities, mark the book as a portrait of a
critical imagination of deep integrity finding a way among
history's obstacles, finding itself in and through the lessons
of the objects - particularly artifacts and poems - that it
encounters.
----------------------------------------
A Perfect V by Mary O’Malley
(Paperback; 14.00 Euro / 17.00 USD / 9.00 UK; 100 pages)
The poems in Mary O'Malley's new collection focus on legal
separation: of Northern from Southern Ireland, of written Irish
from its original script, and of husband from wife. The book
explores a season in hell when the verities vanish, the love we
live by dies, and the ramparts that shore up our existence are
demolished. A marriage breaks down, children leave home, love
itself is questioned. What is home now? Where is it? And how do
we live when we cannot return? The personal is examined through
the lens of the greater human chaos. This is a book about
eviction, an examination of the nature of home that is both
private and political, written out of a sense of the barbarism
that threatens to overwhelm the deep song of Ireland.
----------------------------------
Collected Poems of Greg Delanty
(Paperback; 22.50 Euro / 27.50 USD / 15.00 UK; 256 pages)
This volume brings together twenty years of the acclaimed Irish
poet's work. Each of Greg Delanty's six books so far published
is an entity in itself, a single-seeming movement. Bringing the
books together in a single volume, juxtaposing them as it were,
reveals the enormous resourcefulness and wit of this unusual
poet who keenly interweaves material and themes drawn from his
reading, writing and living (there is no real line between
them). Marriage, childbirth, friendship, landscapes Irish and
Indian and American, real and imagined, politics, the personal
and private and the public...we are organised as a word and a
line and a stanza are made from a tray of type, as in a tapestry
the unseen sewing happens and holds, as in growth a foetus
evolves into a child. Things fall apart, too, and there is
pattern and method in that process as well. The poems draw on a
rich inheritance from the different worlds that Delanty moves
in: Ireland and America, Gaelic and English, traditional verse
forms and modern colloquial. Past and future, their people and
places, inform and interpret one another.
-----------------------------------------------
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