Read Ireland Book News - Issue 14
<-- [Back To Main Menu] 1. The Famine Ships by Edward Laxton (paperback; 7.85 Irish Pounds/11.80 US Dollars approximately) [Add To Basket]
Between 1846 and 1851 more than a million Irish people, the famine emigrants, sailed to America. At the same time, the Irish potato famine claimed a million lives. This book tells the story of the courage and determination of those who crossed the Atlantic in leaky, overcrowded sailing ships and made new lives for themselves, among them William Ford, father of Henry Ford, and twenty-six year-old Patrick Kennedy, great-grandfather of John F. Kennedy. Contains 16 colour illustrations and numerous b+w photos.
2. W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Myth by Keith Alldritt (hardcover; 25 IRP/37.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
In this authoritative new biography, the author reveals the concealed side of Yeats's character by drawing attention to the poet's strenuous involvement with the world outside him. Yeats, the mooning young dreamer and the student of the occult is here, but so too is the determined careerist, the workaholic, the pushy impresario, the manipulator, and the brawler.
As a poet, dramatist, nationalist and politician Yeats was a driven man; he had to prevail. This led him into conflicts and fights many of which he never wrote about, his lifelong battle with his younger sister, Lolly, for instance. Often aggressive, Yeats had the gift of subordinating himself in relationships with those who could enrich his mind, his art, his career. On instance closely examined in this biography is his calculated tolerance in middle age for the brash young American, Ezra Pound.
Yeats's great achievement had much to do with his shrewdly managed involvement's with others. This book allows these involvement's their proper place in the foreground of his story and shows a man propelled by an energy in himself and in the Irish society of his times.
3. Michael Collins: The Final Days by Justin Nelson (pb; 9.95 IRP/ 15.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
This book includes a wealth of information, articles and photographs first published 75 years ago at the time of Michael Collins tragic death. It includes reprints from the Souvenir Album of the Dublin Fighting 1922. The contemporary account of the 1916 Rising as published in the Sinn Fein Revolt Illustrated and The Rebellion in Dublin makes interesting reading now 80 years later. Also included are extracts from the Michael Collins Memorial Number of An Saorstat from August 1922 as well as from the Arthur Griffith/Michael Collins Memorial booklet published soon afterwards. Also, for the first time a member of the Collins family has agreed to a comprehensive account of the period published giving the family version of this dramatic period. A selection of the family documents and photographs, some of which have never been previously published, are printed here. This book provides a visual memory of the dramatic period of Irish history.
4. Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald, 1763-1798 by Stella Tillyard (hc; 18.50 IRP / 27.75 USD) [Add To Basket]
Citizen Lord tells the story of the headstrong and passionate 18th century Irish revolutionary, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Written with pace and sympathy, it has the force of a dashing novel, bringing a hidden past vividly before us.
Son of a duke, heir to estates and influence, Lord Edward died in a Dublin goal, a rebel and a traitor. Born in 1763, he joined the British army as a teenager, fought in the American War of Independence and was elected to the Irish Parliament in 1783. But his radical sentiments soon showed themselves, beliefs in the goodness of man and the importance of liberty and equality. Returning to North America with the army in 1878, Lord Edward spent time with the Iroquois and was adopted by them as an Indian chief. Back in Europe he became a disciple of the Republican Thomas Paine, visited revolutionary France and joined the Irish underground in the 1790s. Even his love life was political: from his tragic love for Elizabeth Linley, wife of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, to his marriage to the daughter of a French republican. In the final years of his dramatic life, politics and passion came together. With his wife as his help-mate, Lord Edward plotted Irish independence from Britain. He was captured and died , raving and wounded, as the bloody rebellion of 1798 raged around him.
Largely based on personal letters and contemporary sources, this is a dazzling narrative, a moving biography, and an exemplary and unusual history.
5. Woman to Woman by Cathy Kelly (pb; 5.99 IRP/ 9.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
A sparkling first novel: Jo Ryan and Aisling Moran have it all - or have they? As a fashion journalist with Irish glossy magazine, Style, Jo has a great career, independence and a handsome sports photographer for a boyfriend. Aisling Moran appears to be deliriously happy with Michael, her brilliant editor husband, two beautiful ten-year-old sons, and a show-house home she's rag-rolled and stencilled to within an inch of its life.
But life is rarely as it seems! One fateful Friday, Aisling finds a receipt for expensive lingerie in her husband's suit pocket and Jo finds a blue line on her blue-for-positive pregnancy testing kit ...
6. The Book of Irish Weirdness: A Treasury of Classic Tales of the Supernatural, Spooky and Strange (pb; 8.99 IRP / 13.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This collection of 35 chilling-stories features imaginative writing by Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and Joseph Sheridan LeFanu. Leprechauns, banshees, ghosts, giants, demons, and other time-honoured subjects of Irish folktales take on a cryptic cast. A murderous magistrate transformed into a giant rat terrorises a young student in Yeats's story, "The Judge's House." In Gerald Griffin's "The Brown Man, " an innocent lass gets eaten by a wicked man who tricks her into marriage. And a wailing banshee haunts an Irish surgeon, portending terrible tragedy in "Hartford O'Donnell's Warning" by Charlotte Riddell.
Other stories range from the creepy - like "The Blood-Drawing Ghost" by Jeremiah Curtin about a blood-thirsty ghoul risen up from the grave - the fanciful - like "Daniel Crowley and the Ghosts," in which the spirits of the dead return from beyond to carouse with the man who made their coffins - to the curious - like D.R. McAnally, Jr.'s "Satan as Sculptor," about the supernatural events behind a bizarre rock formation along the Clare coast.
From Dublin to Cork to Donegal, these classic tales - most dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries - bring back to life (or sometimes back from the dead) the landscape, the lore and fantastic creativity of the Irish storyteller.
7. Chronicles of the Celts by Iain Zaczek (hc; 9.99 IRP / 15.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
This book presents the epic stories of a fascinating people. Here are legends of invincible hero-warriors, faerie enchantresses and magical forests that evoke the fire, pride and passion associated with the Celts. Beautifully illustrated with 120 photographs of artefacts, manuscripts and landscapes, this book captures the vitality of Celtic legends in a modern, accessible style.
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