Ireland Books

This is a job that needed doing and is well done.

Thanks to Waltons Stores of Dublin Ireland

Pretty much self explanatory. The title says it all. This is pretty much a bible of Irish fiddle tunes. So I'll not review the content, but rather my review will be on the quality of this book. First a word on spacing: In order to fit so many songs into such a slim volume the individual pieces are crammed as tightly as they can fit onto the pages and I tend to lose my place. If you are a little older and your eyesight isn't what it used to be you may need reading glasses to be able to make out the small print. My recommendation is to use this as a source book and pick which songs you want to play and make copies of those pages. The binding seems to be of good quality (stitched and glued), but time will tell the tale. Most paperback volumes tend to fall apart after a while, but my suggestion about making copies of the pages you want to play should save some wear and tear on the book. The paper is also a good quality. I'm not sure if it is acid-free or not and this would make a big difference on the life of the pages, but it is a nice semi-gloss stock similar to magazine pages, but thicker. Once you break the spine in the book lays fairly flat even though it isn't spiral bound, so if you wanted to use it on the music stand you could do that. As soon as I got my copy I went through it from front to back flipping a few pages at a time and folded the spine back and this helps it to lay flat. The ink doesn't seem to smeer when handled as some other books have done. There is an interestin introduction by Fancis O'neill and an indespensable index. I'd say this is certainly a good deal for $20.

Keith's story begins in a godly English home, and continues through exciting days in Ireland, with the early Charismatic renewal and street level Evangelism, expressing love for both Protestant and Catholic Irish people alike. Now rooted in the land and people of their adoption, Keith and Elsie share the lessons, experiences and fruit of their international ministry and frequent travels. The lessons this book teaches us are hammered out on the anvil of his life - successes and mistakes alike. I've quoted this over-used metaphor because there has been much of this hammerings in Keith's life. He well knows the truth of Our Lord's promise in John 16:33: " In the world you shall have tribulation " The Lord keeps His promise and assures us in the midst of pressure that He has overcome, so be of good cheer. There is much to cheer about in this story! Adventures of living faith, when God steps in at the last minute; healings of the seriously ill, which touch the emotions; words of supernatural knowledge, and reconciliation across the divide of religion and race; all jostle together. This wisdom is laced with Keith's dry sense of humour, which could be easily missed. Who would get married on the verse of 1 Samuel 17:10 "Give me a man that we may fight together"? - Well, Elsie did! Keith has learned to protect and inspire his two sons and daughter; they all love and serve Keith's master. That is a great commendation, and one we should honour and seek to emulate.

Secondly there are a large number in full-time ministry today who recognise and gladly confess the influence of Keith's teaching and example as set out in this book. Keith's influence on the generations just coming up behind him is very extensive indeed. This augurs well for Ireland and tells us that Keith certainly didn't get it far wrong. May God help us through Keith's book, to also obey the vision He has given us.

Keith's story begins in a godly English home, and continues through exciting days in Ireland, with the early Charismatic renewal and street level Evangelism, expressing love for both Protestant and Catholic Irish people alike. Now rooted in the land and people of their adoption, Keith and Elsie share the lessons, experiences and fruit of their international ministry and frequent travels. The lessons this book teaches us are hammered out on the anvil of his life - successes and mistakes alike. I've quoted this over-used metaphor because there has been much of this hammerings in Keith's life. He well knows the truth of Our Lord's promise in John 16:33: " In the world you shall have tribulation " The Lord keeps His promise and assures us in the midst of pressure that He has overcome, so be of good cheer. There is much to cheer about in this story! Adventures of living faith, when God steps in at the last minute; healings of the seriously ill, which touch the emotions; words of supernatural knowledge, and reconciliation across the divide of religion and race; all jostle together. This wisdom is laced with Keith's dry sense of humour, which could be easily missed. Who would get married on the verse of 1 Samuel 17:10 "Give me a man that we may fight together"? - Well, Elsie did! Keith has learned to protect and inspire his two sons and daughter; they all love and serve Keith's master. That is a great commendation, and one we should honour and seek to emulate.

Secondly there are a large number in full-time ministry today who recognise and gladly confess the influence of Keith's teaching and example as set out in this book. Keith's influence on the generations just coming up behind him is very extensive indeed. This augurs well for Ireland and tells us that Keith certainly didn't get it far wrong. May God help us through Keith's book, to also obey the vision He has given us.

_Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism_ by Jost Hermand is a book which provides a fascinating examination of some of the literature surrounding the rise and subsequent fall of the Third Reich. The book examines many sources, mostly idealistic and utopian in nature, from philosophers and writers, as well as a great deal of the science fiction and fantasy type novels that proliferated during the rise of the Third Reich. The book also provides an excellent collection of pictures, including detailed drawings by National Socialist fellow travellers, Volkish utopians, and Romantic Teutonic dreamers, which make this book quite unique. This book shows how those within the Volkish movement beginning in the Nineteenth century and culminating after the defeat in the First World War, calling for a Third Reich, were naïve dreamers and utopians, whose viewpoints were ruthlessly exploited by the opportunists within the upper echelons of the NSDAP proper, and Hitler himself. The book also traces out the background of Hitler and shows precisely which aspects of Volkish ideology and utopian theorizing were to play an influence on him as he grew in power after commandeering the reigns of the NSDAP. It should be noted that pastoralist and utopian dreams frequently became replaced by purely technocratic and Social Darwinist ideologies as soon as Hitler came to power. The book includes a vast amount of detail beginning with early calls for a socialised utopia by Fichte (and other philosophers) in the spirit of the French Revolution as well as along the lines of those laid out by Tacitus in his _Germania_ (the society of the primitive Germanic tribes), to calls for a restored kingdom (under a great ruler (Der Furher) - a supposed revival of that of Friedrich the Great), to the ideas of various "Aryanosophists" and pan-German nationalists (early preludes to the NSDAP) such as Guido von List, to the calls for "conservative revolution" by those "leftists on the right" such as Ernst Junger and Oswald Spengler, to the bizarre theories of Hans Horbiger (believed in by Hitler himself) regarding a global age of ice (made popular by the novelist Edmund Kiss), to the ideas of the Land Reform movement of Volkish idealists calling for a move towards the East and emphasizing the agricultural ways of the old Teuton, as well as beliefs in a primitive Teutonic matriarchy needed to achieve breeding towards the superior race, to the ideas of Hitler himself. This book makes available literature that has not become available in any other place, much of it destroyed after the war (or suppressed during the Third Reich by Hitler as heretical, an apostasy from official Third Reich propaganda). The book also includes material made available during the Second World War regarding the superiority of the German race and nation, much of it science fiction literature (often extreme in both its racism and anti-Semitism). For containing all this information, mostly discarded by other historians who will not touch upon the irrational elements behind the Third Reich, this book is to be highly recommended.

I was somewhat sceptical before purchasing this book, since most German historians these days write their books with an extremely annoying Marxist terminology; EVERYTHING is interpreted as the struggle between the "classes", even when it is blatantly obvious that the subject has nothing whatsoever to do with this nonsense. Although this book shows tendencies to this from time to time, it is not something you get annoyed by. The book chronicles the authors and their work in the field of prose literature by the radical "Right" in Germany, from the early 1800's, to the end of Germany in the Ragnarok of 1945.

Seeing as no books are written in a vacuum, Hermand includes a lot of information about the general history of Germany and the political and ideological development that took place on this side of the political spectre. Most of the literature from these gentlemen of the radical "Right" was relatively Utopian and Apocalyptic, and most of it is today very hard to find, being condemned to the bonfires in the "de-nazification process" of post-war Germany. In these literary purges all the literature deemed "brown" by the occupational forces was purged from libraries and private collections and only very few copies remained. Hermand has done everyone interested in this period, and especially those who are unable to read German, a big favour with all his short résumés of this vast literature, and the intellectual milieu it was created in.

The book mentions a lot of names and books, most of them unknown today and also manages to paint a very thorough picture of the times as well. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in the various Utopian movements, thinkers and authors in Germany from the 1800's to 1945 that took their part in the struggle against the Modern world. As a bonus I can mention that the edition is very pretty, filled with wonderful art and photographs that would have been worth the price of the book alone.

Highly recommended!

Published just prior to the hunger strikes of 1981 which claimed the life of ten IRA prisoners, "On The Blanket" details the so-called "dirty protest" that led up to the horrors of that year. With several first-hand accounts from prisoners and actors in the struggle, Coogan presents an unflinching account of the events in Long Kesh (the Maze) and Armagh prisons. The descriptions of the conditions in both prisons will move even the most cold-hearted reader. Coogan puts forth an important work that will stand as testiment to this troubled period in Irish history.

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT THE DIRTY PROTEST BY THE IRA PRISONERS IN H BLOCK OF THE MAZE PRISON ONE OF THE PRISONERS WAS BOBBY SANDS. WHETEHER YOU AGREE WITH THE IRA OR NOT IT IS A TRAGIC INCIDENT AND SHOWS THE WILL AND DRIVE OF THESE 10 MEN AND ALL THERE SUPPORTERS AND THERE STANDING FOR THE THINGS THEY TRULY BELIEVE IN ESPECIAALY IN SUCH DEPLORABLE CONDITIONS. SOME BOOKS ABOUT THE TROUBLES ARE A LITTLE DIFFICULT TO GET THROUGH BUT THIS WAS A PRETTY GOOD BOOK

A.L.F. Schaumann's "On the Road with Wellington" is a delightful memoir of his service as a deputy assistant commissary officer during the Peninsular War. Schaumann's duties as a civilian supply officer for various units took him everywhere the Anglo-Portuguese Army went on campaign during the period 1808-1812. As a non-combatant, Schaumann's story focuses on the mundane tasks required to keep an army quartered and fed, but his eye for detail captures vignettes of the soldiers and civilians with whom he dealt. His gift for narrative provides the reader with a strong of sense of what it was like to be on campaign in that era. His account of the retreat of the British Army under Sir John Moore to Corunna under horrendous conditions in the winter of 1808-1809 is particularly vivid (and heartbreaking).

This is not a battlefield account, although Schaumann was close enough to the fighting to pass on some accounts of battles. Nor is this in any sense a history of the Peninsular War. Strategy and politics are played out well above Schaumann's head, and even Wellington is glimpsed only in passing. The average reader will sometimes be dependent on the footnotes to understand what is happening in the larger war. What Schaumann does provide is the human level detail that makes such a distant conflict real for the modern reader. It is no wonder that writers such as Bernard Cornwell of the Sharps series happily mined Schaumann's memoir for material. Cornwell provides an introduction to complement the translater's preface and the author's own introduction, all well worth reading for the context of Schaumann's story.

This book is highly recommended to students of the Peninsular War. It may also be of interest to the casual reader with some background in the Napoleonic Wars.

Greenhill Books has done students of the Peninsular War a great favor with this addition to their Napoleonic Library. August Schaumann, a 30-year old Hanoverian served as a commissary for the King's German Legion, paints an incredible picture of Britain's war in Iberia while maintaining a running travelog with wry humor and succint observations. Whether describing the horrendous retreat to Corunna, his cook (the Witch of Endor), the small kissable feet of a young lady, or the peculiarities of the English, French, Spainish and Portugese his insightful pen entertains and educates without stopping. His small book will make you roar with laughter and sigh sadly at man's inhumanity to man.

Alaine Polcz is the foremost child psychologist in postwar Hungary. After more than forty years of silence, she sat down one day and wrote these memoirs of her life as a young woman in Hungary during the war. The result is an extraordinary window into the decay of the German occupation of Hungary, and the "liberation" by the Soviet Red Army. There is no other book quite like this--ranking (with Agate Nesaule's Woman in Amber as one of the finest firsthand accounts of mass rape ever written.

This book is an autobiographic account of the experiences of a woman in the closing months of WWII. It had a huge effect on me: the inhumanity and cruelty made me both angry and sad but at the same time, the honest voice of the narrator touched me deeply. Even the most horrible details of rape and humiliation are told in a very straightforward manner and you often wish this whole story were only made up. But the fact that it's not what makes this book so remarkable. You get to know a woman who, despite all the terrible things, survived and not only survived but had the inner strength to face and, by telling her story, re-live her past. Before reading the English translation, I was a little bit skeptical because Hungarian literature doesn't translate easily into English (or any other languages for that matter). And then came my surprise: Mr. Tezla did a perfect job with the translation! I think people all around the world would find reading this book an unforgettable experience!

The book was very interesting and exciting. The pace was fast and never had a dull moment. Selina was very accurate decribing her job duties on a Military Depot. Also her everyday dealings with the Local Unions was very humerous, but generally very true.
She described the characters is the book very well.The plot was very good.

I found the book very exciting and fast paced. Once I started reading I couldn't put it down. I quickly learned to love the "good" guys and hate the "bad" guys.
The book was set in Pennsylvania, an area I know well, so I found that part very interesting. The author was very exact and accurate in her facts about the area.
I think that Selena has a lot of spunk, and I look forward to hearing about her next adventure!

This book consists of interviews with about a dozen CENTENERIAN women (women 100+ years old!) in Montenegro compiled in 1990 by A Serb-American. One woman is a Serb muslim, the other a Catholic Albanian and there's a Muslim Albanian and the rest are Serb women.

The women all think back to the Balkan Wars, WWI and WWII. This book shows what Serbs were really about at the turn of the century and what the forces that invaded Serb Montenegro (Turks, Austrians, Germans) were really like.

You hear detailed stories of wars, death, hunger, torture, decapitation. You think the Balkans are a scary place on the news now? Listen to a dozen women 100+ YEARS OLD tell you about how bad it was when they were young.

Only in this book, you get to hear about the cruelty inflicted ON SERBS not by Serbs for a change. Those called "Turks" are in fact Serbs whose ancestors converted to Islam, today's "Bosnian Muslims" and "Austrians" refers to Croats and these same
"Turks" who - together with the Austrians descended on Serb Montenegro in WWI.

The book also talks about how patriarchy made life a grueling nightmare equally for all the women: Serb, Muslim, Catholic Albanian and Muslim Albanian women. You honestly have to read it to believe that women were actually treated this way by husbands and other family members. It is the ugliest side of Balkan life told by those who experienced it personally. The women are so candid, frank and forthright that you really get into their head and sort of grasp the outdated mentality with which they saw the world until their very last days. These women were young when the greatest technological marvel their mountaineer society could ever see was the wonder that is the sowing machine.

Made me so proud to be a Serb.

This is an exraordinary book that reminds women everywhere of the unbelievable struggle of our ancestors to survive. The women in this book could have been from anywhere in a different time, enduring the worst that the world had to offer, yet they emerge from these pages with a unique strength and dignity in spite of it all. I'd highly recommend this book, not simply as an athropological study, but to anyone seeking where they came from. Because this is a book about the history of us all.

Although the world ended long ago, Millman takes you through some fascinating fragments. Poignant, vivid, engrossing. It's a great book. I only wish I hadn't lent mine before it went out of print.

This book shoud be back in print. It is a wonderful piece of first rate journalism. The folks come alive and Millman as always shows the Human Side. For the gent who posted the other review, if you want a copy of the book again go to ABE or Advance Book Exchange!

Interesting account of history in Derry, Northern Ireland during the Troubles, which includes family and community life. Writer has wonderful style that keeps you engaged from cover to cover.

Interesting account of life in Derry, Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Writer has a wonderful writing style that keeps you engaged from cover to cover.