Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 126
Contemporary Irish Cinema edited by James MacKillop (Paperback; 25.50 IEP / 33.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
At a time when national cinemas in France and Japan have been marginalized on world screens, movies from and about Ireland have attracted huge audiences and captures top international prizes, including an Academy Award. In this book, James MacKillop takes a variety of approaches in the treatment of films and film makers. Essayists, like Harlan Kennedy, John Hill, Martin McLoon and Brian McIlroy, represent leading journalists and critics; other contributors include young scholars well grounded in current cinematic and literary theory.
The authors probe cinema's rewriting of Irish history, from the controversial 'Michael Collins' and 'In the Name of the Father' to playwright Stewart Parker's overlooked miniseries on Ulster sectarianism, 'Lost Belongings'. Jim Loter brings the writings of Martin Heidegger to bear on Cathal Black's dark comedy, 'Pigs'. And attitudes toward the institutional church are revealed in Pamela Dolan's analysis of 'Playboys.'
Monto: Madams, Murder and Black Coddle by Terry Fagan and the North Inner City Folklore Project (Paperback; 5.00 IEP / 7.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
This book chronicles the history and reminisences in a part of Dublin rich in the memories of its people. The Monto area, long thought of as simply a place of pimps and prostitutes, is shown here in a different light as those persons who experienced lift around Montgomery Street and its environs are brought to life through colourful anecdotes and humorous tales. Prostitution, however, gave the Monto its notoriety, and provides the background to many of the stories contained in the book. Monto attracted among its many visitors the Prince of Wales.
Brien Friel's (Post) Colonial Drama: Language, Illustion and Politics by F.C. McGrath (Hardbakc; 37.50 IEP / 49.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Brien Friel is one of Ireland's most important living playwrights and this book places him in the new canon of postcolonial writers. Drawing on the theory and techniques of the major postcolonial critics, the author offers fresh interpretations of Friel's texts and of his place in the tradition of linguistic idealism in Irish literature. This idealism has dominated Ireland's still incomplete emergence from its colonial past. It appeals to Irish writers like Friel who, following in a line from Yeats, Synge and O'Casey, challenge British culture with anitrealistic, antimimetic devices to create alternative worlds, histories, and new identities to escape stereotypes impossed by the colonizers. This book is an important and accessible and scholarly introduction and illustrates how Friel playfully subverts the English language and transcends British influence. His reality is constructed from personal fiction, and it is his liberating response to oppression.
Double Visions: Women and Men in Modern and Contemporary Irish Fiction by James Cahalan (Paperback'; 31.50 IEP / 40.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
In this book the author examines gender issues in the writings and lives of a dozen notable Irish authors and their fictional characters. Covering literature from the late nineteenth century to the present, he seeks to close the gender gap in Irish literary history by pairing similar works of fiction by both men and women. The author addresses, for instance, how women writers' characterizations of men compare with men's representations of women. Sensitive to other distinctions such as class and region, the author reveals differences in perceptions of shared subjects - such as politics and autobiography - to illuminate a series of 'double visions'.
Contents include readings of the Aran Islands narratives of Emily Lawless and liam O'Flaherty; the comic fictions and serious careers of Somerville and Ross and James Joyce; the coming-of-age novels of Edna O'Brien and John McGahern and Brian Moore; the 'Troubles' novels by Jennifer Johnston, Bernard MacLaverty, Julia O'Faolain and William Trevor. The book's introduction is a far-ranging critique of feminist criticism and gender issues in Irish cultural history, while the conclusion touches on several other resent Irish novels and films.
From the Sin-E Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish by Eamonn Wall (Paperback; 15.50 IEP / 21.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Eamonn Wall arrived in the United States in the 1980s as part of a wave of young, educated immigrants who became known as the 'New Irish'. In this book he comments on his own experiences and those of his generation, who identify as much with contemporary ethnic and immigrant America as they do with the long-settled Irish American community. His starting point is the now-closed Sin-e Café in New York's East Village, which was a hangout in the early 1990s for expatriate Irish musicians, actors and writers. He comments on the poetry, fiction, essays and memoirs of both the New Irish and Americans of Irish heritage, locating them within a literary and historical context. But this is also a deeply personal book in which Wall wrestles with his own identity as an Irishman living in America, raising his children and learning to love the American landscape, from the streets of Manhattan to the Black Hills.
The Photograph by Eamonn Sweeney (Paperback; 10.00 IEP / 12.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
From a moment frozen in time, this novel sets out to retrace the stories of four men: Henry Caslin, former dancehall owner and later Taoiseach of the Irish Republic; Jimmy Mimnagh, ruthless businessman, failed politician, hopeless drunkard; Seamus McKeon, a successful journalist and TV personality; and finally Father Gerry Lee, a priest with a predilection for very young children and strong links to the IRA. The author draws his masterful portraits convincingly and with great poignancy, tracing the four men from their humble beginnings through four decades of public and private life. An extraordinarily rich narrative emerges, in which the personal stories of the central characters and the larger issues of Irish National politics and identity are woven together to show the brutality and the tenderness, the ambiguities and the certainties, the comedy and the tragedy of half a century of Irish life.
The Easter Rising: A Guide to Dublin in 1916 by Conor Kostick and Lorcan Collins (Paperback; 6.99 IEP / 11.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This book is a vivid and entertaining guide to the events and locations of the Easter 1916 Rising. Defying all the odds, 1600 men, women and children went out on 24 April, Easter Monday, 1916 to fight for an independent Ireland. The battle raged for 6 days and resulted in the destruction of many parts of Dublin city. The bloody executions of the leaders by the British after the Rising awakened a generation to the cause of Irish freedom. Vividly illustrated, this book takes the reader through the battle-torn streets of Dublin. The reader hears the sounds and small the gun powder of the times; the reader meets the main players of the complex dramatic episode in Irish history.
The Appeasement of Terrorism & The Belfast Agreement by Patrick Roche (Paperback; 6.50 IEP / 11.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Published by the Northern Ireland Unionist Party and written by its deputy leader, this book purports to be "a clear and devastating analysis of the concessions to Irish nationalism and Sinn Fein/IRA terrorism in the Belfast Agreement. The book looks at the formation of the Adams/Hume pan-nationalist front; the political elevation and legitimisation of Sinn Fein/IRA terrorism in the Mitchell Report; The UUP capitulation in the Belfast Agreement to the fundamentals of Irish nationalism; the corruption of democracy and the rule of law in the Belfast Agreement; the Belfast Agreement and the destruction of the Royal Ulster Constabulary; and the legitimisation of Sinn Fein/IRA terrorism by business and church leaders." The book claims to demolish any claims of Irish nationalism and outlines a basis for devolved government in Northern Ireland grounded on the merits of unionism rather than on the appeasement of terrorism.
Crannogs: Lake-dwellings of Early Ireland by Aidan O'Sullivan (Paperback; 5.99 IEP / 7.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
People lived on crannogs - artificial lake islands built of stone and wood, with a surrounding palisade - over a period of a thousand years, from the Early Medieval to the end of the Early Modern period, and they represent an astonishing record of tradition and continuity in the landscape. Wooden buckets, textiles, leather shoes, bone combs and many other fragile materials that are not normally found by archaeologists have been excavated at crannogs, all wonderfully preserved by the waterlogged conditions, making these sites particularly rich sources of archaeological information. This book illustrates the archaeology of Irish crannogs using photographs of sites and artefacts, reconstruction drawings, antiquarian etchings and computer-based maps and models. It touches on such aspects as the construction and appearance of crannogs, their sitting in the landscape and the nature of the houses, pathways, fences, entrances and boats that they have produced
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