Ireland Books

Some commentators have argued that "The Third Policeman" is a riff on Einstein's theories of relativity, while others argue that the text is a Menippean satire that probes the limits of rational Western epistemology. Here, Hopper argues in a mostly persuasive fashion that "The Third Policeman" is a postmodern metafiction far surpassing "At Swim-Two-Birds" in cleverness and complexity, finding evidence in such areas as the obvious God-figure of Policeman Fox to the policemen's readings from Eternity, here startlingly explicated. Hopper's book is remarkably easy to read for an academic text, though I admit that by the end of the book I felt as if its points had been repeatedly hammered into my skull, perhaps by a special bicycle pump manufactured from a hollow iron bar. Incidentally, Le Clerque has drawn attention to the importance of percussion in the de Selby dialectic and shown that most of the physicist's experiments were extremely noisy. Unfortunately the hammering was always done behind closed doors and no commentator has hazarded a guess as to what was being hammered and for what purpose.

Keith Hopper's study of Flann O'Brien is one of the very few essential works of Irish lit crit to be published in the last twenty years. Hopper's basic thesis is that O'Brien's most famous book, "At Swim-Two-Birds", is not his most brilliant and imaginative work. "At Swim", or "AS2B" as we O'Brien experts call it, is really a half-hearted venture in late modernism, spoiled by the author's diffidence, carelessness and sentimentality. He reaches his full powers in the savage black comedy "An Beal Bocht", which unfortunately for most people in the world was written in the Irish language, and the thoroughly eerie tale of robbery and guilt "The Third Policeman". Hopper shows how the latter book is one of the first full-blown works of postmodernism, a metafictional head-trip that prefigures Italo Calvino by about thirty years.

After the book was rejected a couple of times, O'Brien shoved the MS into a drawer (it wasn't published until after his death) and ended up frittering away his enormous talent in a decreasingly entertaining newspaper column, throwing off a couple of lame novels before his early death. It's a sad story, and Hugh Kenner has convincingly argued elsewhere that O'Brien himself was alarmed by the implications of "The Third Policeman" and made a conscious decision not to publish it.

Hopper's arguments about the status and significance of postmodernism in Ireland are a sorely-needed counter to the generally blandly realistic mode of fiction that has dominated Irish writing since Frank O'Connor got his first big royalty cheque. "The Third Policeman" is funnier, scarier and more profoundly alarming than any of John Banville's jeux de desespoirs (Banville always reads to me as though he's been translated from the Czech, anyway). An important and neglected book. Irish culture could be a lot more fun for everybody involved if Mr. Hopper had been listened to.

This book is a comprehensive volume with songs in Scottish, Irish, and Manx Gaelic as well as Cornish, Welsh, and English.

I played a few tunes out of this book at my friends house and had to get it. There are so many beautiful folk songs that can be played on any instrument.

This recent offering by Ted Cowan is one of his best to date. It effortlessly tells the story of the importance of Scotland's Declaration of Arbroath and its possible influence upon the American Declaration of Independence. It is lucid, written in a fluid and at times humorous style, and brings alive this significant part of Scottish and American history. I strongly recommend it.

A highly articulate and analytical look at the Declaration of Arbroath, a fresh look at the impact and progeny of the Declaration and peppered with pungent and provocative ideas. I learned so much about not only the drafting of the Declaration, an astonishing document, but also its international connections running through the centuries, through to the covenanters and on to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Heavens, if two Scotsmen (Wilson and Witherspoon) could have done so much for American Independence, so much research needs to be done on the quarter million other Scots in America in 1776! I was very impressed, not only by the considerable fresh look at all the research by Professor Cowan, but he writes with such style and humour that this is an engaging and thought provoking read.

If you're interested in an excellent overview of the literary fairy tale, in particular its use by Victorian Women writers, this book is the best I know. The authors present their argument in logical and readible chapters that highlight the tales that follow. Auerbach and Knoepflmacher are constantly referenced by other scholars for good reason. Their conclusions are insightful and useful, and I highly recommend them.

Auerbach and Knoepflmacher have assembled a fascinating collection of fairy tales by Victorian women writers. The collection offer rarities by well-known writers such as E. Nesbit, Christina Rosetti and Francis Hodgson Burnett and by forgotten, but equally interesting, writers such as Jean Ingelow. Absorbing reads all on their own, the stories also offer interesting contrasts to the better-known Victorian children's fantasies authored by men, such as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and the Oz books. The editors' discussion of the stories (and one novel) are enlightening without being heavy-handed. An extra pleasure is the inclusion of several illustrations. This is that rare piece of lit. crit. that can be read aloud to children--I particularly recommend E. Nesbit's stories for this purpose.

My great grandfather was one of the Famine Irish who immigrated to the United States in the mid-19th century. He came from County Cork with his parents and little brother to the Port of New York. After living in Pennsylvania for several years they found their way to the rich farmlands of southern Minnesota. To learn more about his life and times, I recently began doing some family research. During the course of that work I came across Bridget Connelly's wonderful book.

Not only did I find Forgetting Ireland well written and fascinating, it also helped me to unravel my own family's story. While reading her book I found myself spending time in county courthouses, small town libraries, church graveyards, and at the Minnesota Historical Society. I poured over old township maps, land patents, census records, death certificates, and tombstones in order to piece together my great grandfather's life in Minnesota. Reading Bridget Connelly's book while doing my research was like taking two parallel journeys through Minnesota's Irish immigrant past. It was great fun; like being one of the History Detectives on PBS.

The next step for me is to contact the genealogy societies in Cork to see if they can locate the town and parish where my ancestors came from. If they're successful, then I would like to travel to Ireland like Bridget Connelly did and look for our relatives.

Anyone interested in oral histories, 19th century Irish immigration, or the development of Minnesota's prairies should read this great family story.

The book arrived Friday and I couldn't put it down. It is an absolutely fascinating account of the early settlement of Minnesota by the Irish. I grew up in Graceville but had no idea of the rich and controversial history of the area. It's a great book but difficult to categorize. It's one person's search for understanding of her family, a historical account of an controversial incident in the history of Minnesota and the Catholic Church and an example of the difficulty we face in understanding our history. Was John Ireland "worse than Jesse James"?

An excellent and very readable history of France from the French Revolution to the Mitterand presidency. Wright covers all the major events in concise readable prose. Although this is frequently assigned as a text for college and graduate level French and European history classes, it is also suited for a general reader who wants to learn more about Modern France.

As for the question as to whether this book discusses the demographic shifts in France in the late 20th century, it does not. This is the 1995 revision of a book that was conceived in the late 1960s by a European history professor at Stanford. It is really a survey of 1789 to 1980 without much discussion of the growing Islamic population in France.

Gordon Wright's "France In Modern Times" is an all-encompassing book about French history from the start of the 1789 Revolution to contemporary times. This book has been required reading in all of my French history classes and with good reason: it clearly defines the main themes of French history in language that everyone can understand. In other words, one does not have to be a professional historian or a graduate student like myself in order to understand the points that Wright is highlighting. Furthermore, Wright gives an outstanding bibliography that enables one to continue their research on the various topics that he discusses within the book. If you are looking for one book on modern French history, this is the one that you should buy!

This very nice little book has some great recipes in it. My friends have been copying them out and making them for their own families. The baked goods range from hearty breads to delicate desserts. Highly recommended.

If you like to bake breads of all kinds, especially rich-textured or unusual ones, but don't have a lot of time, this book is definitely for you. Celtic breads are quick breads (they use soda instead of yeast), and are wonderful in flavor and texture. The recipes are clear and easy to use, and most of the time use common ingredients like oats, wheat bran, or potatoes. Sometimes, ingredients such as barley flour may be a little more difficult to find. Even so, there are many wonderful recipes you can try. My personal favorite is Oat Farls (a farl is a wedge cut from a circle). I highly recommend this book!

After admitting I haven't tried all the recipes, I have eaten at a new restaurant at Downtown Disney, an Irish Pub, Raglan Road, where it's Chef is Dundon. Shepherds pie was wonderful as was the fish chowder, though it's called 'Not fish chowder". They were out of the cookcook so I came to Amazon.
I can't wait to try more... Nice reworkings of Irish cuisine and a beautiful book, too.

`Full On Irish' by Irish Michelin starred chef, Kevin Dundon is the third book of Irish `haute cuisine' recipes I have reviewed and it comes the closest to what I would expect from such a book. It is definitely superior to `New Irish Cookery' by Irish / Canadian chef / restauranteur / culinary TV hosts Paul and Jeanne Rankin, but a bit less rich in information than `Elegant Irish Cooking' by culinary scholar, teacher and professional chef, Noel C. Cullen Ed.D, CMC, AAC. But, it is by far the very best cookbook if all you want is modern Irish recipes.

One immensely refreshing fact I have seen with several Irish cookbooks recently is that they typically have a relatively low list price. This book, which, if done by a notable chef from Chicago or Savannah or San Francisco, would easily cost $35 or more, lists for a mere $25. Since this may be construed in part as an advertisement for the author's restaurant, Dundon is following Emeril Lagasse's model by keeping such books with promotional content relatively low. The amazing thing is that there is practically no self-congratulatory material here. It is all about the recipes and the Irish artisinal products, which is largely based on farmhouse cheese production, free-range poultry, and seafood farming.

The heart of the matter, of course is the recipes, and this is what impresses me most about the book. For starters, the book has been edited carefully to adapt all measurements and terms to an American audience. Second, and probably more importantly, these recipes are exactly the kind I look for in such a `modern take on traditional cuisines' book. All the recipes are based on both strong Irish raw materials doing variations on a lot of traditional Irish dish styles and cooking techniques. My favorite is the new take on boxty, the Irish potato pancake, done in the form of a potato salad. Third, almost all recipes, especially the ones for soups, starters, and `light bites' are relatively simple, and virtually all recipes seem to follow a similar style of execution.

My only very minor complaint about the recipes is that either by chance or by a little cultural borrowing, chef Dundon gives us a potato omelet which is virtually identical to the very famous `tortilla a la espanola' or potato frittata of Spanish tapas bar fame. The recipe is given with not a wink or a nod to the fact that this is a very famous Spanish dish, and the fact that Irish potatoes are its main ingredient is simply a coincidence.

In every other way, this is an excellent book for fans of Irish cooking. I was especially intrigued by the kitchen garden vegetable stock, which is correctly cooked only a short time, but held to infuse for several hours before filtering. This star of the larder chapter may in itself be worth the price of the book for serious foodies.

If all you want is a few traditional Irish recipes for the middle of March, this may be just a bit too much, but even if that is what you want, this book will still stand you in good stead with useful year round recipes, especially for shell fish, cheeses, and vegetables.

Highly recommended.

I first viewed this book at my local library and after going over it, decided to purchase it for my own personal library. The book covers a wide expanse of gardens in Britain, Ireland and not mentioned in the title, Scotland. Book does not give in depth information about layouts of gardens and such, but does contain one or two pics of mentioned gardens and locations in write ups. The photographs are simply beautiful.
The gardens in England are broken down into sectors, such as south-east England or North England for those who may be going to visit. Often, they contain pictures of the manor houses, cottages, castles or architectural elements in the gardens.The book also includes antedotal information about past occupants of houses, gardens or historical events surrounding the houses and gardens. For me, that added immensely to the overall enjoyment of the book. It's a winner.

This large and attractive book is a reference book on over 1,700 of the most beautiful gardens in the British Isles. The largest part of the book is the Guide, in which public-available gardens are discussed, complete with colorful pictures. Grouped by region, each of the gardens is given a quick introduction, a more in-depth description, and important information, including location, size and when open. After the Guide comes the Gazetteer, in which the author looks at many different gardens, including some still privately held and those belonging to cemeteries and hospitals.

Overall, I found this to be a very enjoyable book. I really liked reading the descriptions of the gardens, and the interesting historical notes. The one thing that would have made this book better would have been more pictures. But, it is already a pretty hefty book, and I do realize that adding more pictures would have made it huge.

But, that said this is a very interesting book, especially for anyone who plans on being able to visit these wonderful gardens themselves.

It seems to be commonly believed that Alexander the Great was sexually attracted to both young men and to women. (In fact I've heard that the Greek govenment is suing the recent TV production for claimin this.)

In this book Professor King traces the transition of a society which had subordinated all men, women and boys to higher ranked males to one founded in sexuality. He explores the subject through literature, through the actors on stage, and in portraits from the time.

I found particularily interesting his intrepretation of the many times in Shakespeare's plays that a woman and/or young man exchange identities. (It is perhaps significant that the author worked as a stage manager in Chicago before his teaching career.) This is likely to be a seminal book in gender studies for some years.

King historicizes male sexuality in the Gendering of Men and in so doing challenges those histories that have treated masculinity and male sexuality as a transhistorical given and not as a social construct/ideology that serves specific political (patriarchal) purposes.

Gender theorists, like Judith Butler, have long assumed that gender is performative. That is to say one might be born with a particular sex organ but "gender" is not determined by that sex organ. Thus Butler maintains that gender is not what one is; its what one does. In short "gender" is not a natural category but a practice. Butler argues that gender identity is performative because one constructs what one is in specific social-historical contexts. And those contexts are always changing. In Butler's account new contingencies are always emerging and thus new selves are always emerging in response to new conditions of possibility. However, this does not mean that the individual has any kind of agency in the process for the performativity of masculinity and femininity can be coerced. In fact Butler and King argue that notions of gender (as well as gendered notions of privacy) are underwritten by patriarchal structures.

King argues that in early modern England (1600-1750) body practices were strictly regulated by a pederastic social structure; and that different social spaces/places required the enactment of different body practices. And that because body practices were enacted within a power continuum sexuality was not seen to indicate a particular subjectivity or agency or privacy but rather ones body practices were determined by where one happened to be placed in that power continuum. According to King in a pederastic order (courtier society) both male and female subjects presented themselves as objects for the Kings gaze in hopes of gaining favor. Since a pederastic society is one where status is everything masculinity per se was not yet the marker of privacy, subjectivity and autonomy that later epochs would construe it to be.

Many historians mark the long eighteenth century as the moment when two things emerged: privacy and heteronormative sexuality. (Many Renaissance scholars would argue that these things existed long before the long eighteenth century). The key argument of Kings book, however, is that "privacy", "sexuality" and "gender" (including notions of interiority, masculinity, feminininity, and the companionate marriage) emerge in resistance to courtly pederastic practices. In Kings account these things all arise as one emergent historical regime defines itself against another residual one.

The most prominent history of the rise of the middle class in early modern England is Jurgen Habermas's. King finds Habermas's widely accepted account whereby (mostly male) subjects become aware of themselves as newly autonomous subjects while reading novels in private to be suspect. King finds that Habermas's account tends to assume that reading practices allow men and women to reflect upon an already existent heterosexual subjectivity. King, on the other hand, sees subjectivity as an effect created and determined by new market relations. This is a key difference between Habermas and King because King, after Butler, believes men and women do not simply read to reflect upon an already existent heterosexual subjectivity but that reading practices, body practices, cultural practices etc...are constitutive acts.

Habermas assumes a sameness and consistency in all male desire throughout history and he assumes that all male desire is always already heterosexual and thus Habermas fails to read gender and gendered notions of privacy as historically constituted categories. Habermas also fails to account for the fact that a diverse population of emergent male and female subjectivities may respond to the same historical conditions and each other in vastly different ways. Kings takes into consideration both residual and emergent gender differentials and so his account allows for much more subtle and nuanced (and much more interesting) readings of seventeenth and eighteenth century texts and the residual and emergent subjectivities that they describe.

It is to the theatre (instead of the novel, Habermas's form of choice) that King looks for evidence of an ongoing attempt to produce/evolve/negotiate/regulate/disrupt/enforce notions of subjectivity (ie gender practices, gendered notions of privacy); it is also to the theatre that King looks for the political causes/implications of these new practices.

A fascinating book.