Ireland Books

The author has artfully created a painful and powerful portrait of a woman ravaged by social conventions and the horrible perversions of sexual abuse. The book is extremely well-written...even so, it is painful to read simply because the horror of abuse wallops one right in the face. One's heart aches for Elizabeth. The story serves as a stark reminder that this is not just a "fiction" account. Many children throughout the world today are living Elizabeth's life. Although I've read other reviews of the book which claim a "hopeful" ending, I found the ending to be a resignation to the stagnant, love-starved state of a woman's bloodied heart. Elizabeth's decision to become a single parent is a cry of despair. Do read the book to get a true idea of how the abused feel.

This is a very emotional book. The central character is Elizabeth Wallace and it tells of her childhood stolen by abuse and dependence, her adolescence filled with confusion and her early womanhood leaden with the difficulties of coming to terms with her abuse by her father as well as the dependence and later the loss of her mother. The Elizabeth at the end of the book is a strong woman who, disillusioned with family life as she has experienced it, chose a commitment to motherhood on her own terms. It is a book that will bring home to you the destruction caused by alcohol and abuse and remind you that every child has a right to their innocence. It is an extremely well written book, which even though the subjects dealt with are at times far from pleasent, makes the book a pleasure to read. Definitely worth a try and you will not forget it in a hurry.

As a child of the Scotch Irish diaspora, I am finding this book riveting.

The thesis presented here carefully demonstrates the powerful and ongoing impact of the Hebrew Scripture, particularly the covenanting of God's "Chosen People," on peoples who read and take seriously (even literally) the several thousand year old constructs of the ancient Hebrew tribe of Israel.

Most of my pondering about the "why" of customs and belief systems of my own almost entirely Scotch Irish family find articulation in this amazing book. Four hundred years after Calvin and over 200 since the last of my family left Ulster, the power of the covenant lingers still.

I wish Dr. Akenson could consider exploring the town of Due West, South Carolina, and Erskine College, to find the very strong threads of this culture alive and well in the United States.

D.H. Akenson has masterfully taken a complex subject, that being the Old Testament, along with South African, Irish, and Jewish histories, and has put it together in a very compelling thesis. It is well organized in sections dealing with the origins of the particular covenants, a section on the covenant and the state, and a section of the covenant in recent times. The book is very hard to read for the layman, but for the informed he has done a great service. The only weaknesses I find is that he does not do present enough analysises of the differences within the covenanted peoples, especially as certain factions differed on the application of the covenant.

This is a fantastic, thorough and (most importantly) readable guide to the daunting ask of attempting family history research in Ireland. It is obvious that the authors have plenty of experience with the subject, and offer some unexpected and well thought out advice. I found it very helpful.

I just want to point out that the authors of the book are Sherry Irvine AND Nora M. Hickey. The book is erroneously listed as being written bu one person named "Nora Hickey Irvine". Maybe this can be corrected to make it easier to find.

One of the greatest pleasures in reading is suddenly finding out books that are absolutely flawless. That moment of realisation that there is nothing wrong with a book is what makes me keep on reading, and reading, and reading. "Good King Richard?" is such a book. It will keep you interested, engrossed, will make you laugh, but above all will make you think. How many works of historiography can boast that, I wonder?

The theme is self evident: the first chapters are an account of Richard III's life, acession to the throne and, most of all, the facts and the opinions that were current during his lifetime. After his death at Bosworth Field we move on to the treatment given to his reputation, and how it has changed during the last five centuries.

Die-hard anti-Richards will probably dismiss this book as steeped in partisanship (obviously ignoring the fact that they are deeply partisan themselves), but they are missing the whole point. Potter's work is of an erudite and scholarly tone while remaining entertaining and acute, and he does what many forget to do, which is to put events in the context of their times. Traditionalists prone to moralising should mention what they would do if they found themselves in Richard's shoes in 1483, and they should also avoid forgetting that Richard prevented an outburst of civil war by accepting the throne.

I am quite obviously a Ricardian, but what remains unique about this book is that it is one of those rare jewels that combines acessibility with knowledge, entertainment with scholarly seriousness, a contemporary acuteness with a firm grasp of the idyossincracies of other epochs. Richard has lost a great advocate with the passing of Jeremy Potter, and the world of History has lost one of its few outstanding writers.

There is adequate evidence available to doubt the "traditional" Thomas More/William Shakespeare account of King Richard III. Since 1997, there have been two mock trials (with various U.S. Supreme Court Justices as jurors) charging Richard III with the murder of "the princes in the Tower." In both instances, King Richard III was acquitted. This book's arguments give the evidence as to why Richard and his reputation should be re-examined. Sadly, Jeremy Potter passed away in Nov 97. He will be missed.

Bottom line, this is a great book. The introduction alone,
by editor Laurie Kain Hart, is absolutely extraordinary,
and the author's own preface is exceptional. But the text,
and the heart, of "Good People in an Evil Time" is simple
accounts by ordinary Bosnian people of their experiences
during the war.

Many other books have addressed political, military, and
historical aspects of that war, but frankly few of them
seem to help in understanding the human side and the
present day. For those who did not experience the war first
hand, answers to the human questions have been very slow in
coming, but this book has them by the dozens in the voices
of ordinary people.

For the creation of this book Broz was exceptional in
several ways. She is a granddaughter of Josip Broz,
commonly known as Marshal Tito, Yugoslavian hero of World
War II and head of state of the communist post-war
Yugoslavia. Her family name carried respect that
undoubtedly gave her entree to pass many gates that would
have closed to others and provided a foundation for trust.
Her status as a doctor gave her standing to request entry
to combat zones to try to help those who were suffering,
and her personal qualities brought her to act where most
others would not.

In Broz's own words, "Treating people of all three religious
traditions, I felt their need to open their souls and tell
me, shyly at first, what had happened to them during the
war. From these brief stories on cardiology wards, I
realized how thirsty people were for a truth that was subtle
and nuanced where the shells were falling, in a way that it
wasn't in Belgrade or in the worldwide black-and-white
coverage."

A great achievement of this book is to show so clearly how
people are more than their membership in an ethnic group.
Hopefully, it will also remind us to look beyond
caricatures of ethnic groups in conflict and to search for
victimizers and power seekers who hide themselves or profit
by casting blame everywhere but on themselves.

For the Bosnians and those near to them, this book also
helps to confirm that goodness among them was not isolated,
to remember and honor some of those who practiced it. My
wife and her family came to America from Bosnia as refugees
during the war, and many members of their extended family
still live in different parts of Bosnia. While without
doubt there are bigots, villains and crooks as well as
decent people in the former Yugoslavia, the voices in this
book echo the many experiences and first-hand accounts of
the mutual understanding and simple unconcern over ethnic
differences among ordinary people of the region.

Agression on Bosnia 1992-1995. This book is giving extraordinary testimonies about small everyday people who helped others, cherishing compassion and human kindness, even many times putting them-self in deadly situations, crossing the lines of ethnic divisions, religions or political opinion. All stories are proof that human goodness must prevail over human darkness, that human being alone and small as it look,can make huge difference in our world. Bosnian story can happen anywhere, so it is highly recomended in todays world, where more compassion is needed in our every day life.
Thank you Svetlana for your great work.

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!

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.