Ireland Books

I won't be writing a long review since it is absolutely unnecessary. The book is mastefully written, by a skilled researcher. Inspiring, entertaining and remarkably easy to read. Great bibliography and very useful! Clear structure, well-presented arguments, quotes are to the point and from a wide variety of texts. Am simply loving it :)

In a well-known scene of Gothic horror, Bram Stoker's Dracula "throws a moving, whimpering bag at the feet of his three wives." He offers it for their consumption in exchange for the man they have surrounded, the man he desires, Jonathan Harker. In the bag, of course, is a struggling child.

In this breathtaking study Margot Backus unties the strings binding that bag and makes visible the suffering and fear in that child's face when it realizes its fate. In the same Duke University Press series as Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and David Lloyd's Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment (1993), this book matches the standard of complexity of its predecessors. It not only presents the first substantive materialist reading of the Gothic, providing a refreshing corrective to the long familiar, almost singularly psychoanalytic approaches that dominate organizations like the International Gothic Association. It also insists on the inseparability of materialist critique, psychoanalytic approaches, and anti-colonialist critical models. All three are Backus's starting points. And broadening her staging ground still further, a critique of heteronormativity is rigorously incorporated into the analyses throughout.

This makes for an ambitious project. But it is a project that largely keeps its promises through some of the most complex, occluded, and liminal terrain in Irish Cultural Studies. For this reason alone, it deserved the ACIS Durkan Prize for best first book in any field, which it has won this year.

At the heart of Backus's analysis is the problem of child sacrifice within the Anglo-Irish colonial order. Backus explains: "A relatively unmentioned fact of colonial and postcolonial politics is that colonial rule, particularly where colonialism has taken the form of mass settlement, requires the production of children" (2). Furthermore, to keep the system going, to legitimate and perpetuate settler rule, this class sacrifices its children.

For the violent colonial order into which settler children are born predates them, remains a priori to their consent, and will repeatedly interpellate them regardless of their assent or refusal. Constricting, turned inwards upon itself, the settler family cell becomes a chamber of horrors re-inflicting the violence of its traumatic origins and present entrenchment upon its children. Isolated and embattled, the settler class becomes autophagous and pedophagous, i.e., self and child-consuming (two key terms for Backus). The appropriation of children's sexuality through incest, for example, becomes one mode of pedophagy. Indeed incest, adult/child rape, and a range of violations echo throughout this class's domestic history. Crucially, however, it is a history that has been vigilantly silenced. But, as this book teaches us, it is a silence that can become audible if one knows where to listen.

A small, concise book that informs and entertains in addition to becoming a reference book for further reading. It covers the pinnacles of Greek history from prehistoric times to the fulfillment of the dream of hosting the Olympic Games in 2004. Highly recommended! - Gene Chronopoulos, President, Greek-Americans in the Arts and Entertainment

Hands down, the best compact history of Greece out there!

Excellent scientifical work, tells the whole story on how modern Greece became what is today. If you haven't read anything on MG till now, start by reading this one.

The only way to understand modern greek history is to provide the social and political background of the civil war which took place in the maountainous regions of Northern Greece.David close examines this and gives us a unique portrait of a divided country.Historiography must rely on such works. In conclusion , a total masterpiece.

For most Americans, Guy Fawkes is known to us more from that movie "V for Vendetta" then for anything else. Guy Fawkes Day on 5 November is weird sort of a holiday as any when people of Britain lit a bonfire and roast an effigy of this fellow over it. When I was staying in a small town of Franley, England, I was surprised to learned that Fawkes family still exists and control much of the land around. So I read this book and discovered it to be somewhat of a page-turner.

This book is about the plot to blow up both Houses of Parliament and King James I. Roman Catholics of Britain was getting desperate over increasingly restrictive measures taken by King and Parliament so a group of them decided to take matter in their own hands. Guy Fawkes was the leader of that plot and he had both religious and political motivations to do so. The book proves to be clearly written and highly informative on why, how and who was involved in this plot. This was supposed to take place on 5 November 1605 but the plotters were betrayed and although they came close, it was not good enough. The entire historical episode read like a detective story. It also had major importance in its aftermath as well for the Catholics of Britain who found themselves even more restricted. The author, Antonia Fraser who have already written several superb books on British history, scored again with this book.

I found the book to be informative and easy to understand the complex and slightly weird story behind this plot that easily could have been one of the greatest terrorist attacks in history. The author's style of writing is appealing to most casual and veteran readers of history. Book come highly recommended to anyone interested in this historical incident and its cultural significant.

I believed this is the new title and edition of Faith and Treason that was published back in 1996.

As the old saying goes Remember, Remember the Fifth of November, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot. In the present day come November 5th we all look forward to a firework display and a bonfire on which to burn the effigy of someone called Guy Fawkes while enjoying a roast potato, some of mum's parkin and cinder toffee. But who is the man called Guy Fawkes and what did he do that was so bad that we have to burn him every `Bonfire Night.'

Guy Fawkes was born in the city of York, less than 20 miles from where I live. He has always been attributed with the leadership of a group of men who plotted to blow up the Houses of parliament on November 5th 1605. Their motives were both political and religious. Even today many such similar deeds are carried out or attempted in the name of one religion or another. A damning indication that man very rarely learns from his mistakes.

Antonia Fraser is an accomplished and much read historical author with many awards for her writing skills and she has the consummate skill to be able to make the book read like a modern day detective novel, yet in no way prejudicing the factual historical content of the events that led up to the plot being foiled literally at the last moment.

It is only to be expected that seven hundred years ago, people did things differently than they do them now. We have difficulty viewing so far back, certainly because language and culture were different, but mostly because detailed records are scarce. Robert Bartlett has provided a unique solution to give us as good an idea as possible "...of the spoken words of the past in the time before the tape recorder" in _The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages_ (Princeton University Press). A professor of medieval history, he has examined closely a peculiar event for which there is rich documentation, a judicial commission which was an inquest into a supposed miracle. While it might seem that such an inquest would be too arcane to give us much of an idea of medieval times, Bartlett has found that the sometimes conflicting testimony of witnesses and the process of the inquiry gives us a window through which we can almost see and hear our ancient ancestors and understand matters important to them. Bartlett has produced an enjoyable volume of time travel.

It was probably in 1290 that William Cragh was hanged in Swansea. William Cragh was perhaps merely a "notorious brigand," but in the words of the English rulers of his region he was one of the rebels "in the war between the Welsh and the lord king." In fact, he was hanged three times. The first time, the rope broke. The second time, the gallows from which it was suspended broke. The third time seemed to have worked just fine. His body was taken down and carried to a house in Swansea for preparation for burial. Its face was black, its eyes bulging, its black and swollen tongue extended. The son of the baron who had condemned him confirmed that William Cragh was dead. But he gradually came back to life. This particular revivification was fraught with religious meaning. William Cragh on his way to the gallows gave a prayer for his life to Thomas de Cantilupe, the recently deceased Bishop of Hereford. Thus, his return to life had the makings of a religious miracle, and an inquest had to be done to make sure. The interrogation of witnesses is the backbone for Bartlett's book. Along the way, we learn about attitudes towards saints, the means of measuring distance and time, and other details of the way the participants lived.

Thomas de Cantilupe got made a saint by a very long process. Canonization was requested seventeen years before the inquest actually happened in 1307, and then there was a long process of approval before Thomas was made a saint in 1320. This was a time of flux for the papacy, with five different popes and years when there was no pope, which partially explains the delay. What shooed Thomas in was a consistent public relations campaign from the local Bishop and the fellows he enlisted, sending fan letters. Also, King Edward I had strong interest, because he had known Thomas personally. Thomas has served on Edward's royal council, and Edward was eager (as he himself wrote), "... to have as a sympathetic patron in heaven him whom we had in our household on earth." While Bartlett's fascinating book tells a lot about the intricate process of sanctification, it tells a lot more about the people of medieval times and their world view.

It's bizarre that we would know so much about, say, Lady Mary de Briouze (one of the principal witnesses in the sanctification case Dr. Bartlett here serves up) when we know so little about, say, Shakespeare, for Lady Mary lived her magnificent imperious life a full three hundred years before Shakespeare's birth. And as Dr. Bartlett complains, much less is known about the lives of eminent women in comparison to their male counterparts. The martyrdom of William Cragh, and his prayers to Thomas de Cantihope, led to a gathering of and the muracle, if you ask me, is that so much of their testimony has been preserved verbatim.

Dr. Bartlett points out that it isn't merely the facts the witnesses reel off that are so interesting, it's the way that memory fails or comes to their aid in unexpected places. It's almost as though memory worked in different ways in the 13th century than it does now, so we are constantly wondering why Lady Mary, when asked, couldn't answer yes or no to what seem like the simplest questions: were her children alive in the year of Cragh's death, for example. Surely she could calculate that far back, it had only been a number of years. Dr. Bartlett speculates that it's possible that her "I can't remembers" have clues iembedded in them, clues to their larger psychic and financial lives. Maybe people didn't have, back then, the supreme attachment to children that they do now, or that society expects of us, and that might explain Lady Mary's extreme vagueness about the status of her children, for she might well be dithering about trying to remember if she owned a particular scarf in 1289, not a daughter. In such ways, worthy of a Henry James, Bartlett brings every verbal statement under the eye of a scientist, examining each for its textures and potentials.

Almost as interesting, even if, in the final analysis, not quite so, is the detail with which Bartlett runs us through what he calls the "Cantilupe process," the steps by which the medieval church proclaimed its saints. The story of the hanged man is quite arresting all by itself; sliced down from the gallows three times, Cragh found himself coming to life again after entreaty to the recently deceased Cantilupe. Witnesses testified his skin had gone completely black in death, even his tongue; and yet Lady Mary's stepson averred, that Clagh's rosy complexion was restored within a few hours.

I loved this book. For juevinile fiction it's tops. The story makes you hope. Makes you eager. Makes you wonder. If you love characters, you will love this story. ..'the witch, the wolfhound, the dead monks who haunt the abandonded abbey, and the Irish famine...' ...how can you resist?? :)

I think The Haunting of Kildoran Abbey is a good book for anyone to read, because it's showing kids working together to help their people during a time of need.

North has done something no author has done with regard to his subject in far too long; he actually took the time to look into it and put forth his own thoughts instead of regurgitating the works of others. (Most notably Stanley's "search for AS paganism") Just when I thought there was little ground left to break on the subject, along comes North's book and challenges long held and long overlooked aspects of Anglo Saxon pagan belief. From the onset of the book to the final chapter on Paulinus and the Stultus Error (which is brilliant I would like to add)I did not set this book down once. A must have for the student of Anglo Saxon culture and Theodisc Heathens alike. Brilliant work from a brilliant scholar. Wes thu Peter North hal!

While I found Mr North's overall view of Anglo Saxon Heathenry a bit short, his specific information and his comparitive knowledge and examples with the rest of the Germanic world is a treasure for todays Heathen/Asatruar. If you can spare the $, and are not new to Heathenry, get this book. You will be amazed at what hints of Heathenry survived in Anglo Saxon literature. Wes Heathens Hal! :-)

At last a book on gardening that doesn't assume the reader has unlimited money, and space, to work with- and best of all, Dillon admits to her gardening failures so you don't feel too bad about your own. I thought her wry humour on the subject of water features worth the price of the book in itself.

At last a book on gardening that doesn't assume the reader has unlimited money, and space, to work with- and best of all, Dillon admits to her gardening failures so you don't feel too bad about your own. I thought her wry humour on the subject of water features worth the price of the book in itself.

I had the privilege of being Dr. William A. Sessions' research assistant at Georgia State University, and I have never seen, before or since, a work of such outstanding scholarly research written in his unique style of combining scholarship with human insight -- making this work accessible to all, and extremely useful to the academic community. It is a fascinating story, well told--possibly the first academic "page-turner." This important biography is written with such insight and so compellingly one cannot put it down. It is an extraordinary work by a brilliant scholar who is also a marvelous writer.

The Earl of Surrey was the co-founder, along with Sir Thomas Wyatt, of modern English poetry; the whole procession from Spenser and Shakespeare down to Yeats and Eliot starts with Surrey and Wyatt. Surrey's most notable contributions were the creation of English blank verse and the development of the English sonnet from Italian models; without Surrey we should not have Shakespeare as we know him. Surrey was also a distinguished soldier and a loving husband, who was executed for treason at age twenty-nine.

The nineteenth century produced two excellent lives of Surrey, those of G. F. Nott and Edmond Bapst, the latter in French. The twentieth century had not done so well, as the principal accomplishment of Surrey's 1938 biographer, Edwin Casady, was translating Bapst's discoveries into English. William Sessions swings the balance the other way, his Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey being a magnificent tour of Surrey's life, his poetry, and his world.

Sessions offers the first fully integrated biography of Surrey, addressing his art, family, society, culture, religion, travels, and military career. The book is based on a massive amount of research, both archival and geographical, for Sessions visited virtually every site of importance in Surrey's life. The illustrations alone, some never published before or not properly identified, almost justify the cost of the book.

Sessions corrects many key facts of Surrey's unevenly documented career. He shows, for example, that Surrey was a moderate Protestant, whereas Nott, Bapst, and Casady simply assume that Surrey shared their own religious views--an approach complicated by the fact that Nott was a Protestant while the other two were Catholics. Getting Surrey's religion straight is absolutely essential to understanding a short life spent at the center of the escalating violence of the early Reformation. Finally, Sessions uses the full texts of the original documents concerning Surrey's downfall (instead of reading the published summaries), thereby untangling much of the mystery that occurred amid the religious strife, dynastic uncertainty, and naked ambition at the end of the reign of Henry VIII.

The history of non-violent liberation movements, as re-told in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, often neglects mention of this wonderful character. Eyewitness to the bloody mess that was the French Revolution, he came to the task of liberating his own country with wit, energy and a commitment to avoid bloodshed.
The best part of this wonderful book for me is the story of how over a period of years, O'Connell and his "Catholic Rent", collected faithfully around the country, eventually empowered enough people to meet the requirements of the franchise (in effect, buying the right to vote) to be able to elect their own representatives instead of being represented again by men chosen for them by the local feudal establishment.
MacDonagh presents The Liberator in all his contradictory glory. Feared by the British as a rabble rouser and eventually dismissed as a compromiser by more radical successors, this careful Dublin lawyer showed his countrymen that their country could be theirs once again. It's a great story, as sad and thrilling as any good Irish story, and this book is wonderfully well written. I recommend it to anyone interested in human liberty and/or Irish history.

Few figures in Irish history loom as large as the nationalist politician Daniel O'Connell. Born in 1775 to a small landowning family, he was taken in by a wealthy uncle who sponsored his education. After studying in Catholic schools in France and at the Inns of Court in London, O'Connell quickly emerged as one of the most successful lawyers in Ireland and a leading figure in Irish politics. Having witnessed the excesses of the French Revolution, he rejected the use of violence and preferred to work within the existing political framework to achieve his goal of Catholic emancipation - one which he finally achieved in 1829 after decades of effort.

Oliver MacDonagh's book, the first of a two-volume study of O'Connell, details the personal and political struggles of this period of O'Connell's life. Relying heavily on O'Connell's extensive correspondence, MacDonagh provides an informative analysis of his life in a briskly-moving text that rarely bogs down in tedious detail. If there is a problem with this book, it lies in the author's assumptions of the reader's familiarity with the period. Too often he addresses people and events in passing, leaving out background details and even first names from his narrative. Some explanatory text about matters like the veto or comparisons of the cost of living in Ireland and France would have greatly aided his explanation of events.

Such problems aside, this is an excellent book. MacDonagh offers a well-written study of Daniel O'Connell's life, enhancing our understanding of his measures and motives. It is likely to remain the definitive study the man for many years to come, one that helps us to appreciate this dynamic individual and his impact on Irish history.