Stephen Rea Books

Handsomely produced, elegantly assembled, and consistently engrossing: these actors read the stories with appropriate sensitivity, wit, pathos, and distance. The detachment of Joyce in his "voice" on the page is re-created well. When I have taught students "Araby" or "The Boarding House," the chance to hear the language repeated as its author would have meant it to be rendered makes these stories come alive for a classroom six thousand miles and a century away from early 20c Dublin.

Although all of the stories succeed, those in the center of the book emerged when conveyed aloud most enlighteningly. Clay, A Mother, A Painful Case, and most of all Two Gallants, After the Race, and Counterparts all hit my ear with more force than they had when I had only read them. These stories are often overlooked compared to the others, but the skill that the actors brought to these more prosaic, less lively, and more nuanced examples of Joyce's careful craft deserve special acclaim. The packaging keeps the CDs securely in place, is itself compact and well-designed, fitting its outwardly austere & Edwardian yet subtly decorated and inviting contents.

Students, the curious newcomer, the experienced teacher, and those who read the book out of delight and not duty: all will benefit from the music on the page that by a technology Joyce himself spoke into at its early gramaphone stages is now digitally preserved so that those of us all over the world and a vastly changed world later can be entertained and instructed. I think JJ might have been pleased at this version of his pioneering, eloquent, yet accessible and moving, accounts of his imagined neighbors and municipal counterparts.

James Joyce was absorbed by music, people, languages, acting and actors, and though an exile from his native country and city, his literary consciousness was forever embedded in Dublin. He had an unerring ear for Dublin dialogue.
At night I turn out the lights and listen to these CD's, to the cadences of the people talking, and to me these Dubliners endlessly gossiping are in the room with me. Joyce's narrative adroitness, his choice of words, his lyrical descriptions, and above all, his sense of place are brilliant facets of a genius.
Stephen Rea's sensitive reading of "The Dead" is worth the price of this set of fifteen stories read by fifteen different mostly Irish personalities. The characters in the stories live and breathe, become real. Joyce was meant to be read aloud. It's good talk, conversations that you become a part of.
In these stories Joyce is very accessible. In Finnegan's Wake he became Jackson Pollock--obscure and difficult. In "The Dead" you can feel, touch, hear, and taste the snow that is falling outside the house while inside two old sisters are giving their annual bright and cheery party. It's a story of tenderness, love, regrets, and lost lovers, but it is mainly full of life, good times, fellowship, and above all humanity.

Nine Lives Too Many
The Daemon in Our Dreams
The Rice Queen Spy
Clawed Back from the Dead

I would recommend this book to any teacher or parent of a middle grade students!

I have looked at this book several times, and it is pretty detailed and helpful. I haven't finished studying for the test yet for lack of time. I think it is going to help me quite a bit, because it is also repetitive, which in this cas is good.

This book is a great resource for me and it helped me with my studying. The delivery was awesome.

This is a beautiful book, highly poetic and inspiring. I had never read anything like this, and I've read hundreds if not thousands novels. And, as a former Catholic, I recognize the pressure, the narrow-mindedness, the fanaticism, as well as the greatness. I loved reacing this book, and I will be very unhappy until I find something as good, which may be never.

Written in the voice of a young boy, the story unfolds from the hints and cues picked up by the boy from the adult world around him. I learned about the Troubles from the inside, from the perspective of the main character and his family, which makes it all the more personal and immediate. The writing is lovely and poetic. Highly recommend!

While I enjoyed this novel for its evocation of the moods of downmarket Derry in the postwar mid-20th century period, much of the plot driven by the narrator's attempts to decipher the truth about his family's involvement with the death of a man falsely claimed to be an informer and the flight of the one who was the informer failed to engage me. It's as if the whole mystery that the unnamed narrator unravels stays more locked in his head rather than leaping across into your mind. The book has an extremely hermetic quality, and therefore recalls both the memoirs of Frank McCourt and recent Irish writers as well as, inevitably, Joyce's "Portrait." The scrupulous detachment of Joyce, however, tends to enter this novel more than the sentimentality of a memoirist. There may be about the same amount of humor as in early Joyce, but much more of this work deals with demons externalized rather than internalized.

Yet, this novel will not allow you to wander in your imagination through fully-realized Derry on paper. Contrasted with McCourt's Limerick or Joyce's Dublin, you will gain less of an external sense of Derry's streets; the mental demons and emotional tensions predominate. Deane wishes to place you inside a boy's growing independence from the inhibitions, betrayals, and surveillance that keep him enclosed in Derry.

The phrasing Deane--often deftly-- employs pays homage to his predecessor, and like Stephen Dedalus, the young boy grows up under the tutelage of Jesuits, a working-class urban neighborhood hemmed off by sectarian divides and municipal gerrymandering from its more prosperous neighbors, and an atmosphere redolent of corruption between police and prelates. There's a chapter with a Maths teacher's madly logical recital that could have sprung, on the other hand, from Flann O'Brien, and for lighter comedy many conversations on topics as disparate as curses from returned husbands at sea, the fort Grianan's secret passage, and the film "Beau Geste" -- the latter one made me miss my subway stop, so caught up was I in the wry comedic touches reproducing recursive Irish conversation.

Overall, however, this sober look back at childhood remains with you for the menacing touches-- of Crazy Jim's lubriciously leering ascetism, of a whiskey distillery exploding under police assault on an IRA squad, on the vignettes of suppressed lust and Ignatian spirituality and classroom banter. The book did rush past the Troubles and I wish this had either been left for a sequel, as it deserved fuller attention, or left out. The later decades are glimpsed, but so interesting is Deane's material here that you wish for more than the handful of pages that serve as a coda to the postwar emphasis.

Two brief examples of Deane's prose, both about the same event and place but recalled in chapters separated by five years and a hundred and fifty pages, illustrate his method. The narrator's trying to piece together the past and the fate of the informer that serves as the plot, however dispersed and slowly shared. Such distension of elements that make up this novel is characteristic, and may either lull readers or entrance them. "The dismembered streets lay strewn all around the ruined distillery where Uncle Eddie had fought, aching with a long, dolorous absence. With the distillery gone the smell of vaporised whiskey and heated red brick, the sullen glow that must have loomed over the crouching houses like an amber sunset." (32) This for me recalls a story from "Dubliners."

Compare: "And the distillery smouldered into the dawn, surprising the seagulls who came in from the docks to soar around it and cry away from its heat and smell." (193) This too may recall Joyce! Yet, I do not mean to place Deane within the formidable power only of Joyce. While resonances abound, the added edge of The Troubles and the Northern milieu do show readers elsewhere impressions of an bucolically placed, if often dolefully embattled, city on the River Foyle which, far less than Belfast, or even than neighboring Donegal, has earned much attention in Irish fiction.

While the novel by its ambling structure fragments the telling of the narrator's maturation into gradual understanding cloaked by familial secrets, and so dilutes the impact upon the reader and the narrator, the strongest features remain the telling of the tale itself, more than the tale's contents. "Ghosts of the Disappeared" haunt a field, a child's soul remains trapped in a window, rural changelings and the urban insane mingle in the streets of Derry and the stories of its uprooted people. They enter the city, yet cannot escape rural Irish superstition and the maledictions of their ancestors. This long shadow darkens and ultimately permeates the narrator and his novel.

Seamus Deane is a great writer. His use of language, imagery and his technique for telling the story of his early life in Northern Island in the 40's and 50's is compelling. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in family lore, the power of memory, and the experiences of childhood that shape our lives.

Death? This is surely a novel about its opposite: growing up, albeit in the politically divided environment of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after WW2. It is about life, lived under the shadow of violence perhaps, but not in the midst of it. Its unnamed hero, presumably based on the author himself, ultimately achieves academic success and independence. Yet even so, the book is haunted by death. It begins with a ghost, continues with the passing of several family members, and ends with the demise of the hero's father. But the novel is also haunted by less ordinary ghosts: men in the nineteen-twenties who died in the Republican cause, or who were executed, or who ordered the deaths of others. The way in which the young hero, a generation later, gradually becomes aware of these events, unravels their mysteries, and realizes their devastating legacy to the members of his own family, forms the central narrative of the book.

I would not say that this element is entirely successful. It is difficult at first to grasp the various relationships in this large extended family. Then, as the details become clear, they hardly seem the momentous revelations that the author intends, perhaps because he has difficulty making them impact the choices and events in the present-day story. For the most part, the book is about shame, secrets, resentment, and depression, as opposed to things that actually happen.

But the book is also a memoir of an Irish boyhood. Although it may not add much to others of the genre, it does have the ring of first-hand experience, especially the scenes in the Catholic classroom. But there is very little that locates this experience in the specific setting of a Catholic enclave within mainly-Protestant Northern Ireland. One thing that does, however, is the portrayal of the relationship of mutual mistrust between the community and the police. Some of the chapters describing actual encounters with the police fail to convince, but a mere page describing how the death of a boy in a vehicle accident gets transformed by sectarian myth into yet another instance of police brutality gets it exactly right. Indeed, some of the most memorable sections do not deal with fact at all, but with stories of the supernatural, half-believed but still powerful.

I bought the book at the suggestion of an Amazon friend who knew I was also from Northern Ireland and an approximate contemporary of the author. But I am not sure that this helps. Having been raised on the other (protestant) side of the sectarian divide, Deane's book seems almost as foreign to me as though, as a white American, I were reading Toni Morrison (as, indeed, I have just been doing). But I do know the country, and still have the language in my ear. Deane's writing is poetic but not always actualized; there is little that specifically recalls the landscape of Derry and Donegal. Although odd phrases come through with their cadence intact, for the most part the dialogue is serviceable but generic. It is also strange to see the author describing things through the eyes of a child, while writing in the manner of a mature and sophisticated poet. I get the impression that Deane has gone too far from his childhood and his birthplace to be able to recapture it with the intensity he once felt. A pity.

Its A Decent Book For The Time Frame But I Wish There Was An Expanded Version To Incumpass The Next 20 Years Which He Has Done Alot More

Mick Wall, writer of the Iron Maiden official biography "RUN TO THE HILLS", wrote this book back in 1985, and it is totally out of print by now... It's a good book, not even near the best rock biography ever written, but it does the job. It has very good photos and it gives a good general frame of Ozzy's career up to that point. In this age of Internet, all the information contained here could be obtained without buying the book.

i love ozzy and for any ozzy fan this is an ideal book to read

I got this book in the late 80's and I'm glad I bought it when I did, because it is damn hard to find. Mick Wall spends almost equal time for Ozzy's Sabbath years and his solo years(up to The Ultimate Sin). He also goes into Ozzy's childhood with quotes, a few pictures, and interviews that would be hard to find anywhere else. Lots of Sabbath and Blizzard photos too. All the usual Ozzy stories like pissing on the alamo, biting head off dove, plus a few others you might not have heard. All in all a great book if your an Ozzy/Sabbath fan.

_Hollywood Irish_ is a fantastic collection of interviews and photographs of six handsome and talented actors: Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea, Pierce Brosnan, Aidan Quinn and Patrick Bergin. The simple introduction provided by Áine O'Connor sets the mood for the rest of the book well. As she mentions, the interviews do reveal insightful, private information: "Liam Neeson reveals how he considered leaving acting and how he found the confidence to continue; Pierce Brosnan, simply and openly, shares the painful story of his wife Cassie's death; Stephen Rea discusses the relationship between acting and politics; Aidan Quinn talks about the Irish identity and its many paradoxes; Patrick Bergin reveals the temptations of an actor's life and the difficulties of doing love scenes; Gabriel Byrne tells us about the risks and illusions that surround fame." In a nutshell, that's the book. Each actor discusses his beginnings, both in life and as an actor. Each discusses, in some capacity, how being Irish has impacted him. Each actor's profile comes with several b/w photos from childhood, movies and family collections. At the end, one can find each actor's filmography. The only complaint I would have regarding the book is that the material is dated (only current to 1997) and I wish an updated version could be compiled. That criticism aside, though, this is certainly a title worth owning.

Aine O'Conner manage to capture the cadences of the various actors very well. While reading the text, I could almost hear the men speaking their words. I suspect that she didn't edit the tapes very much, save for verbal pauses (the usual "uhs" and "you knows") and for length. Ms. O'Conner also included several photographs (many were candid) that were sprinkled throughout the various sections.

While Ms. O'Conner asked many insightful questions, she didn't follow through on many. Indeed, at times I was a little disappointed that she failed to follow up on specific points; however, that point is trivial compared to the overall effort of the book.

If you are a fan of any or all of the actors listed, or simply are curious to see how contemporary Irish actors are dealing with the joys and disappointments of Hollywood, then you should enjoy this book.

This book provides a facinating, indepth journey into the lives of six very capable and successful actors. Many humourous and sometimes tradgic tales of life in Ireland and struggles to make a name for themselves there and in America. Each actor tells of personal hardships that they have battled throughout their lives and how they have created such prominent status in today's Hollywood scene. Each story is spoken first hand which adds to the richness of these beautiful retold memories. This book provides a greater sense of who these men are by recalling tales from childhood, adolecence and adulthood which explain their journeys to becoming the great actors they are.

Jack Higgins has created some wonderful characters, starting back with Liam Devlin in the Eagle Has Landed. He has used the device of rescuing a potential lead character from prison or death sentences in the past and Simon Vaughn appears to be the newest. The story moved with Higgins' usual pace: action-filled, developed story line and interesting characters. Worthy of a read.

In the introduction, Higgins wrote that this is one of his personal favourite and after reading it, I can see why.

The story is simple : an ex-Brit élite soldier, Simon Vaughan, was given choice of 15 years in a most undesirable prison, or a dirty job on behalf of Her Majesty's government. The job consisted of infiltrating the IRA, posing as an arms dealer, locate a shipment of gold stolen by the IRA to be used as the war-chest, neutralise the threat of a certain Michael Cork who masterminded the heist.

The development is anything but. From the start, it was a game of deadly deception between the G-men and the IRAs, not just one, but 2 competing factions. Simon found Michael Cork too cautious to get near, and had to deal through the latter's niece Norah, a Harvard-trained doctor who had seen too much death, and her bodyguard Binnie, still believing in an honourable war. Frank Barry, leader of the rival IRA faction, also wants the gold, and the arms, and seems to shadow Simon and his group at every step.

Through their conversation, readers cannot help but feel sad at the state of affairs - it had definitely gone beyond where any side can claim higher moral grounds, yet it cannot seem to stop or the victims might just lose any cause to go on living with their pain. Almost everyone has a decent reason for what they do, whether it be the IRA or the British government. And almost everyone has their hand in some unforgivable misdeed.

Higgins set out to write from his personal experiences and of those around him and he succeeded in describing the situation as a no-win for anyone but pain for everyone. It was also a warning against simplifying the heroes and the villains, but also to focus on the real victims, people who had to live with the bombings and shootings while simply trying to lead a normal live.

Set in rural Ireland, this uncompromising family drama revolves around Michael Moran, the father of five. A member of the IRA during the time of The Troubles, years ago, Michael has apparently repressed violent traumas which, we are led to believe, are responsible for his withdrawal from society and his current violence against his family--it is not the result of drink or the frustrations of poverty.

Now the father of teenage children, he is disillusioned by what he sees as the fruits of this war, remarking, "Look at the country now. Run by a crowd of small-minded gangsters out for their own good." Within his own household, Michael upholds all the values he fought for years ago. He's a hard, independent man, beholden to no one, and his word is law.

To his family, however, he is often a tyrant--obstinate, cruel, full of hatred, quick to anger, and reluctant to apologize--and his second wife Rose, his three daughters, and his two sons are "inordinately grateful for the slightest good will." Outwardly religious, Michael daily recites the Rosary, looking for religious help for his inner turmoil and the complications of his daily life. As he says, "the war was the best part of our lives. Things were never so simple and clear again."

With a main character who is far from endearing, McGahern challenges the reader to empathize with Michael and understand why the women in his family remain tied to him emotionally, even after they have successfully escaped his domination and established independent lives away from the farm. Gradually, the reader begins to understand the overpowering need to form connections with the past, even when it is not pleasant--to forgive one's parents for their limitations while remaining strong and faithful to oneself. In clear, straightforward prose of immense power, McGahern piles mundane detail upon detail, creating a sensitive family story of great universality, one which will give the reader much to ponder. Mary Whipple

This book has lots of practice questions with answer key. Practic test with answer key and explanations. There are 4 diagnostic tests on arithmetic, algebra, geometry and word problems. The only thing is there are no answer keys to these 4 diagnostic tests and the questions are more difficult than the subjects in the book itself.