Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 107
New Biographies, Autobiographies and Memoirs
James Dillon: A Biography by Maurice Manning (Hardback; 25.00 IEP / 36.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This book fills a significant gap in the recent political history of Ireland. It adds considerably to our understanding of how the State's institutions and political system became defined after independence. It examines, from a hitherto unexplored perspective, how the process of parliamentary opposition operated in the new democracy which was the Irish Free State and, later, the Republic of Ireland. Indeed, one of the reasons why this book is to be welcomed is that its subject, James Dillon, has never heretofore been the focus of comparable scholarly scrutiny. The book is a valuable and original chronicle, from a unique perspective, of Ireland in formative, difficult and challenging times. It is an Ireland that is scarcely recognisable today. This is the story of a public man in the best and most complete sense of the word - a man without whose commitment to public service, Irish democracy might not be the robust and secure organism which it now is.
Dead as Doornails by Anthony Cronin (Paperback; 7.99 IEP / 10.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Anthony Cronin's classic account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colourful as one would expect from an intimate of Bredan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Brian O'Nolan (Myles na Gopaleen); but it is also a clear-eyes, astringent antidote to what passes for literary history and memory in the Dublin of today. Cronin writes with remarkable subtlety of the frustrations and pathologies of this generation: the excess of drink, the shortage of sex, the insecurity and begrudgery, the painful limitations of cultural life, and the bittersweet pull of exile. The generation chronicled by Cronin was one wasted promise. That waste is redressed through the extraordinary prose of this classic work which has earned its place in Irish literary history.
Conversations with James Joyce by Arthur Power (Paperback; 7.99 IEP / 10.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
This is the first paperback edition of this unique and fascinating account of the author's friendship with James Joyce during the 1920s. Power, a young Irishman working as an art critic in Paris, first met Joyce in a Montparnasse dancehall, and the two men maintained a prickly friendship for several years. Power re-creates his conversations with the master, on a remarkable range of topics, literary and otherwise. We read of Joyce's thoughts on writers past and present: Synge, Ibsen, Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Checkov, Dostoevsky, Gide, Proust, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson and Shakespeare. Joyce also speaks of the looming might of America and of his own work.
The Keeper of Absalom's Island by Tom Nestor (Paperback; 8.99 IEP / 11.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
For Tom Nestor childhood was a soaring adventure across a rural landscape. With no place for him on the land or affinity with its toils he resolved to escape. With his pack of dogs he strides off into the green and carefree world of a curious boy in a magical time. Set in the countryside around Rathkeale in County Limerick, not twenty miles from the poverty stricken lanes and ashes of Limerick city, this memoir is peopled with such characters as the mad aristocratic Absalom Creagh, and Miss James and Miss Abigal who taught through the medium of religion and terror. On the road to Rathkeale you pass manor houses, palatine homesteads and grass mounds where houses once stood. The miracle of radio opens a new world - Athlone, Hilversum, Luxembourg, the Goons and the Singing Cowboy. His escapism has set the boy at odds with his father. As the idea of leaving for boarding school fills him with dread he tries to heal the breach but fails.
The Family Business by Adrian Kenny (Paperback; 7.99 IEP / 11.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This novel is many things: a journal of a frustrated young writer and lover; a portrait of bohemian social life in 1970s Dublin; an intimate history of the rising Catholic middle class and of a family in flux. The author writes autobiography with the eye and ear of a novelist, evoking a time, a place and a welter of emotions through vividly remembered scenes, snippets of dialogue, small epiphanies. Unlike most memoirs, which place so much weight on the act of remembering itself, and are thus more about the writer's present than his past, this book has the immediacy of a diary, and an almost excruciating honesty. It is, above all, an extraordinarily accomplished piece of writing.
Angel Face: A Memoir by Sheila Connolly Danzinger (Paperback; 9.99 IEP / 13.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Sheila Connolly was born in County Kildare in 1930, a member of a large family that suffered from the poverty and deprivation that were common at that time in Ireland. She emigrated to America in 1946 and after working at various jobs, she turned to modelling and become Pond's Angel Face by the time she was twenty. She entered the movie industry and married producer and war hero Harry lee Danzinger, later divorcing him to marry Hollywood heart-throb Guy Madison (Wild Bill Hickock), with whom she had three children. Her third husband was producer Robert Dowdell, but Harry Danzinger wooed her back. On a trip to Ireland he bought her the aristocratic Bert house near Athy in County Kildare, formerly home to the Duke of Leinster, a house that she used to cycle past on her way to school, wondering if she could ever aspire to a position as kitchenmaid there. Fresh and captivating, this memoir is a fascinating account of one woman's extraordinary life.
Peadar O'Donnell by Peter Hegarty (Paperback; 12.99 IEP / 17.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Peadar O'Donnell, writer and socialist, was born in Meenmore in west Donegal and educated at St. Patrick's Teacher Training College in Dublin. He became a teacher and union organiser, motivated by his personal knowledge of the appalling conditions endured by migrant workers in Scotland. He took the Republican side in the Civil War of 1922-23, recording his experiences in 'The Gates Flew Open' and edited the IRA paper from 1926 - 29. His agitation against land annuities brought down the Cosgrave Cumann na nGaedheal government. He recruited for the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he founded The Bell and took over as editor when Sean O'Faolain retired. All six of his novels are set in west Donegal, which he knew from boyhood and where he taught. For most of his ninety-three years he was a fighter who stood for social justice. This new biography depicts him as one of the most influential shapers of modern Ireland, through both politics and literature.
No Tears in Ireland by Sylvia Couturie (Paperback; 9.99 IEP / 13.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
In August 1939, Sylvia and Marguerite Couturie, with their Irish governess, arrived in Ireland for a holiday. The plan was that they would be joined by their parents and would return with them to France. But the outbreak of war and the occupation of France by the Germans changed everything. It became impossible for them to return. Sylvia, the eldest, was eleven years old when the war began and she heard Winston Churchill broadcast. She vowed, as her contribution to the war effort, never to shed a tear while the war lasted. In this book she chronicles the vicissitudes of life as an 'alien' in a foreign land and the pain and anguish of all 'the children of war.'
Black Cat in the Window by Liam O Murchu (Paperback; 8.99 IEP / 11.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Born in a fourth-floor tenement, the youngest of twelve, Liam was the son of a Dublin Fusilier and a flaxmill worker. Although half his siblings were dead before he was born he does not 'look back in anger' but at people's tough resolve not to be bitter about life's lot and see the next generation through to better times. Set in the territory of Frank O'Connor on Cork's northside, this is not another sorry tale of childhood poverty. It is a memoir of courage and endurance telling an often uproarious and always poignant story. Alive with the yowling of cats and scurrying of rats, the ghosts of Blarney and Shandon Street appear - ex-soldiers, money lenders, fruit-sellers, and women overwhelmed by children, drink and galloping consumption.
Charles Dickens's Ireland: An Anthology edited by Jim Cooke (Paperback; 12.50 IEP / 17.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
As a young boy Charles Dickens would climb with his sister onto the dining table and sing some of Tom Moore's 'Irish Melodies', songs which are interspersed in all his novels. And as a young parliamentary reporter he recorded Daniel O'Connell and they retained a certain mutual admiration throughout their lives. Dickens had many Irish friends and visited Ireland himself in 1858, 1867 and 1869. He sent out many letters from Dublin and elsewhere describing his Irish triumphs. He was hailed with delight everywhere he went. This Irish tribute records the glory of Dickens in Ireland and this book recreates the world of that bygone, but still remembered, age.
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