Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 119
Speaking Volumes: A Dublin Childhood by Edith Newman Devlin (Paperback; 12.90 IEP / 17.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
In this highly original genre-defying book, the author remember her childhood in Dublin in the 1930s and 1940s as a poor Protestant living among even poorer Catholics. She tells of her strange home in the gate lodge of Jonathan Swift's hospital for the insane, and of her increasingly strained relationship with her devoted but undemonstrative father. Reading was her salvation, and in novels like Jane Eyre, Hard Times and Anna Karenina she found her own inarticulate experience better understood and better expressed. Pithy, illuminating commentaries on the emotional truth of great literature alternate with chapters of strong personal memoir to make this unique book as universal in its reach as it is individual in its telling.
The Truth about the Leprechaun by Bob Curran (Paperback; 5.99 IEP / 7.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This book is an expose of the wee folk of Ireland. Intrepid folklorist Bob Curran not only explores the legends, but also warns of the realities beyond the myths surrounding his diminutive shoemaker and his cousins in the fairy world. From the origins of his hero of Irish folklore - fallen angel, diminished god or son of other fairies? - to his habits, occupations and characteristics - this book offers enlightenment on little-known aspects of the wider fairy world, as well as turning the spotlight on the real Leprechaun - elusive, complex and contradictory.
Hungry for Home: Leaving the Blaskets by Cole Moreton (hardback; 17.35 IEP / 22.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This book tells the story of an Irish island and the dramatic events that led to its being abandoned. The author goes in search of the missing islanders, discovering a few survivors still alive within sight of the Great Blasket. Following the footsteps of the emigrants who had left half a century earlier, he seeks out the dead man's brother and discovers an extraordinary end to their untold story. Driven out of a home locked in the Middle Ages, the exiled islanders had crossed the Atlantic and made a new life in the world's most advanced nation. This is a book about home and what it means, a voyage to America from the edge of Ireland, and a gripping account of a quest for a vanished people. But most of all it is the story of a family, the Kearneys, and their breathtaking journey from one way of life to another.
The Little Hammer by John Kelly (Paperback; 11.90 IEP / 15.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
In a paint-splattered room, a young man and successful Irish painter confronts his shocking and murderous past - a dark day on the beach at Bundoran, Co. Donegal, when he quietly dispatched a palaeontologist with his own geological hammer. His life is further disrupted by the beautiful Billie Maguire, an Ingrid Bergman lookalike who leads him all the way to Prague and involves him - and his beloved and devoutly paranoid grandmother - in yet another grievous crime. Struggling to keep reality and unreality apart, he wishes only to be taken seriously - as sinner and lover, artist and murderer. This novel is a triumph of linguistic brio, dark imagination and wild wit from one of Ireland's exciting new talents.
Ireland - The Inner Islands: A Journey Through Ireland's Inland Waterways by Kevin Dwyer (Hardback; 25.00 IEP / 32.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Here is Ireland's inland waterway network as never seen before. In these magnificent photographs, the reader senses the mood and atmosphere of Ireland's rivers, lakes and canals from the Lee Navigation in the north. Revealed here are the beauty and tranquillity of the Barrow, the Grand and Royal Canals, the Shannon and its lakes, the Shannon-Erne Waterway, and less obvious waterways such as the Munster Blackwater Navigation. The reader is not only taken on a journey on the waterways but also through the countryside, villages and towns of Ireland. This book is a timeless tribute to the great natural beauty of Ireland.
Bunreacht na hEireann (The Constitution of Ireland) (Paperback; 3.00 IEP / 4.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Bunreacht na hEireann (The Constitution of Ireland) was enacted by the people on 1 July, 1937. The new constitution, which replaced the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State, was carried by 685,105 votes in favour to 526,945 votes against. Bunreacht na hEireann falls, broadly speaking, into the liberal democratic tradition of Europe and America. It asserts that all powers of government, legislative, executive and judicial, derive, under God, from the people and it provides for a democratic parliament and government to exercise the legislative and executive powers respectively, and for an independent judiciary to exercise the judicial power. In its fundamental rights articles it guarantees the individual citizen freedom, equality and justice. Bunreacht na hEireann may be amended, but only by referendum. It has been amended twenty times.
The Irish Brandy Houses of 18th Century France by L.M. Cullen (Hardback; 29.95 IEP / 40.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
In the latter half of the 18th century, particularly in the 1760s, Ireland became the focal point of the international brandy trade. This pioneering study, based on exhaustive research in French archives, tells the story of the Irish families - Hennessy, Saule and Jennings, Galwey, Delamain, and others - who played a leading role in brandy distilling in the Charente region of France. Family connections and intermarriage, trading problems, marketing and finance, the role of smugglers and the effects of the French Revolution are detailed by Professor Cullen, against a backdrop of a burgeoning French economy and the expansion of world demand for brandy during a time of urbanization and grain surplus.
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