Celtic Books

Research into the mythology and facts of Arthurian and Celtic times lends to this reference, which explores the era of the Celtic Golden Age, offering a blend of historical fact and legend in an easy A-Z reference of peoples, events, and lore. Black and white illustrations and a centerfold of color accent a book centered on facts, not author opinions: the pairing of Celtic and Arthurian history makes for an excellent reference for any period scholar; particularly at the high school to college grade levels.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Anyone who is interested in Irish culture will invariably be interested in the rich language of the Irish people. The beautiful Irish language is still alive in the 'Gaeltachtai'(Irish-speaking areas) on the West coast. There is also the unusual phenomenon of an urban 'Gaeltacht'in Belfast. Infact the North of Ireland has such a wealth of language that this dictionary was greatly needed. The North (or Ulster) has a remarkable amalgamation of various sub-dialects of Irish English (as well as the actual Irish language itself) and also traces of the dialect of Ulster Scots (spoken by those descended from the Protestant planters who came to Ireland from Scotland). This dictionary is a marvellous record of the speech of all people of Northern Ireland and will be enjoyed by Catholics and Protestans alike. Here there is a wealth of folklore and history since so many of the entries refer to untranslateable concepts pertaining to folk customs, farming tools, folk crafts and so many other interesting topics. The Irish etymologies as well as other cognates are always provided. This is a necessary addition to anuy serious library of Irish books together with any work by O'Muirithe (all available through Amazon) and also Bernard Share's 'Slanguage'(which is not a collection of 'slang' in the dubious sense of the word but a remarkable compilation of Irish English terms with their etymologies and judicious quotes to cite the sources of each entry).

Today, scholars debate the question: what was the real source of the tales about pagan heroes and pre-Christian deities that Irish monks recorded in medieval times? Was the primary source the pre-Christian oral tradition with its Celtic culture and Indo-European roots? Or were the monastic scribes primarily influenced by the Latin sources they acquired from the Continent and Mideast, such as Biblical apocrypha and works of philosophy and nature by authors like Isidore of Seville? Professor Nagy brings to the controversy his careful study of the imagery and motifs used by the monks, showing how the same motifs and treatments were used to recount both saints' lives and hero tales. There are no final answers to the controversy here, but Nagy's insights and scholarship bring clarity to the discussion. NOTE: Readers should have at least some familiarity with the Irish stories.

With the advent of VENTURA version 7, Corel had to re-write the application completely. By doing this, they brought out a version that was rich in the functionality of its predecessors but would suffer all the pains of a version one release. At the same time, Corel decided not to publish a full reference manual with the software but only a general guide to the basic features of the new version. Corel received a good deal of criticism for their strategy. This, coupled with the inevitable bugs and problems arising from the re-write, did not augur well for VENTURA 7. However, help was at hand. Soon after the first interim maintenance release, numbered 7.1443, Corel VENTURA(tm) 7: The Official Guide, was published by Osborne McGraw-Hill. It was written by three authors, Ed Brown, John Faunce and Carol Lovelady, who have, between them, over 30 years of experience with VENTURA. An outline of their backgrounds appears inside the front cover. Suffice to say, they are acknowledged experts who are well qualified to write a book such as this. Although the writing of the book was a team effort, the authors, in the introduction, have supplied the reader with details of who was responsible for each section of the book. This refreshing approach is continued throughout the 35 chapters and appendices. In addition, the authors have taken the brave step of supplying the reader with their e-mail addresses so that you can write to them with your comments or queries. Ed Brown has further demonstrated his commitment to the product and its support by setting up a Corel Forum at the Universal Thread web site. Here, he is attracting a growing community of VENTURA users who are not only receiving a high level of support from Ed but who are also providing valuable help to one another. This book has five major parts plus appendices. Part one, Getting Started with Corel VENTURA 7, contains an introduction to the Corel VENTURA 7 software suite and how to create your first document. In part two, Developing Your Documents, the authors take the themes introduced in part one and expand them. Advanced Topics are covered in part three. Here, I was particularly pleased to find a section, on Corel Database Publisher, written by Carol Lovelady. This is a part of the VENTURA suite that has been sadly overlooked in the past. It is a utility that enables you to take enormous amounts of data from one or more databases, organise and format the data to your specifications, and publish it to Corel VENTURA 7 and to the World Wide Web. Part four, Corel VENTURA in the Electronic World, covers publishing to HTML and the creation of CD-ROMs. This is followed, in part five, by Corel VENTURA 7 in the Real World. I am not sure if I am comfortable with the differentiation but this part of the book brings all the guidance in earlier chapters together in the description of various projects undertaken by the authors. These include a Budget Newsletter, a Scientific Paper, Maintaining Books, Creating Brochures, Creating a World Wide Web Page, and a further section on Advanced Customization with Corel SCRIPT which is initially introduced in the Advanced Topics section. The 140 pages of appendices seems to be a mix of reference material and material that could be easily covered elsewhere in the book. They are nonetheless valuable and cover the Utilities, Keyboard Shortcuts, Corel-supplied Scripts, Equation Editor, Table Commands, and VENTURA Text Codes, with final sections on Questions and Answers and Upgrading which are of particular value. I believe that the authors did not find it easy to write this book. To their credit, it has indeed been a team effort and that effort has brought together their unique skills and knowledge into an outstanding final product. Although the book is entirely cohesive, the individual styles of the authors can be spotted in the various sections for which they were responsible. I have to confess that I have got to know Ed Brown fairly well and I was interested to see if my perception of him was realised in the sections which he prepared. I am happy to report that the high standard of support and help that he has provided to his many friends, both privately and at the Universal Thread Web site, is reflected in this book. However, this does not minimise the significant and well-written contributions from John Faunce and Carol Lovelady. Each of the authors has managed to bring their unique and valuable skills to bear upon a complex product which continues to have the ability to please and infuriate its users in equal measure. Since this book was published, Corel have included, with the maintenance release 7.1465, a reference guide (over 600 pages) in various formats on the CD-ROM. This is, at long last, a valuable resource for VENTURA users. However, I highly recommend that all users of Corel VENTURA 7 supplement this resource by obtaining a copy of Corel VENTURA(tm) 7: The Official Guide. It is an excellent mix of reference and descriptive material that you will find yourself returning to, time and time again. I look forward to further books on VENTURA from Ed Brown and his colleagues.

From the first time Bob Cousy picked up a basketball he fell in love with the game. He played all day and night and mastered his craft until he became great. Little did he know that all this practice would eventually lead him to a professional basketball career after college and make him a lot wealthier in the future.
Bob Cousy played college basketball at Holy Cross where he was a star point guard. After spending four years there he went on to be drafted by the Boston Celtics of the NBA. There he, alongside Coach Red Auerbach and all-star Bill Russell, won 8 championship titles in a row during his long career. After retirement he came back briefly as a coach for the Kansas City/Omaha Royals. With all the failure he had there he decided to resign and become a GM. Both jobs gave him a lot of income and he lived happily with his family.
Cousy on the Celtic Mystique was an interesting autobiography on the life and opinions of Bob Cousy. One of the good features was the action depicted through the detailed writing. In addition, the book was very elaborate. A lot of personal memories from Cousy's life were used to let the reader really get to know Cousy. Also various statistics from his basketball career were used to describe the way he played, once again letting the reader know a lot about Cousy, Another good feature was along that with telling the events in his life he also wrote about other players who, at the time of writing, were currently stars of the league. These things together provide for a detailed, action-packed story that no reader will want to miss out on.

The action-packed writing was the main thing that kept me reading the book. There was a few times where Cousy would recall upon game situations and describe them vividly so that I could picture them in my head. For example, in one of them he describes how his defenders were positioned on the court and how he had dribbled through them and around them in almost every aspect you could think of.
This kind of elaboration was another reason I enjoyed the book. Not only were Cousy's memories detailed but also were his stats were which enabled the reader to have a clear impression of who he was and how he lived.
These memories coupled with his personal opinions lets the reader really get to know Bob Cousy. For example, while discussing his time as head coach of the Kings he tells about how miserable he felt through the multiple losing seasons and how he felt his star player, Nate Archibald, needed more support players to help him win games.

As you can tell, all of the strengths of the book either connect or complement each other which makes it a very good book overall that will appeal to a wide fan-base. The basketball fans will enjoy the basketball action and opinions, while the book fans will enjoy the description and vivid writing. Together these components make Cousy on the Celtic Mystique an interesting read for whoever picks it up.

-C. Duncan

A stupendous translation achievement with useful explanations of the complexities of cynghanedd. There is no parallel
Welsh text but it follows the Thomas Parry edition of the Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym (which you can get from the UK Amazon.com site). An alternative would be the Rachel Bromwich edition with parallel texts published by Gwasg Gomer. I don't know of any translations into modern Welsh. This is very difficult Welsh and the honest truth is that much is lost in translation because so much of the artistry is in the intricate patterns of prosody, and of alliteration rather than rhyme.
I genuinely like this stuff. It often light-heartedly expresses the poet's sexual frustration as much as romantic love. It's not what you'd expect from fourteenth century Wales and the fact that it comes from that place and time probably has much to do with why I liked it.
Kingsley Amis, amongst others, suggested that there is something of the pseud about trying to read, and pretending to appreciate, medieval Welsh poetry. I suppose critics of the effort have a point. You can go to Athens, Georgia and see a magnificient replica of the Acropolis that is much better in many ways than the crumbling thing in Greece, but an irrational part of the mind tends to get more of a kick out of the twenty-five hundred year old thing. When I'm reading this,and trying to read old Welsh aloud, that irrational part of my mind is at work.

Thirty readings from Celtic tradition:
These celestial praises, thirty of them, drew my attention to a fameous adaptation in the book of Proverbs;" Have I not written for you thirty sayings of admonition and knowledge?" Prov. 22:20 The original Amenmope contained thirty 'houses' or chapters(footnote of the Harper Collins Study Bible, NRSV).
In addition Allchin and Esther de Waal brought us with these sixty passages arranged in pairs, inspiring prayers and praises seventeen beautiful illustration from Carmina Cadelica illustrative notes of words.

Journey without end:
"Thy beauty will be ever new , ever freshly kindling a fire, through all the ages of eternity, evermore without fail; a fervent flame without end." Chapter(XXVIII)
This delightfully inspiring book of Celtic spiritual heritage very gracefully presented as a toast in honour of which the reader can raise his glass and drink extacts from Irish, scottish, and Welsh meditation.

Adorable sacred writings:

These 30 Gaelic praises of Irish or Scottish tradition on the left hand page are paired with 30 text of Welsh tradition on the right hand page. In the same way* that Copts chant their praise and psalms, in 'quarters' from two Choirs, North and South. I hope you enjoy this slim but penetrating daily companion, which could be your introduction to the daily reading series, and de Waal's meditation garden.

* for Coptic influence on Celtic tradition read;coptic missionary enterprise , in History of Eastern Christianity, by Aziz S. Atiya, U . of Notre dame Press.

It took me many years of searching to find my 1906 edition of Herminie Templeton's (before she married Judge Kavanagh) adventures of that daring Tipperary man named Darby O'Gill among the Fairies of Sleive-na-mon. For many years after I guarded that volume as one of my most precious treasures. Now thanks to the kind folks at One Faithful Harp Press, I can have a copy that I feel comfortable lending to my friends or even giving to my boys to read.

"Darby O'Gill & the Good People" (along with "Ashes of Old Wishes" which was published more than 20 years later) is the basis for the 1959 Disney film "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" but it is so much richer than that charming children's film. It is a collection of fairy stories to be sure, but even more it is a celebration of Catholic Ireland, and the goodness and morality of the turn of the century Irish peasant.

If you can muster the accent, I urge you to read this book to your children aloud. They will never forget it.

_The Decline of the Intellectual_ by Hungarian born conservative Christian philosopher Thomas Molnar is an account of the rise of the intellectual in public life and his subsequent decline. Molnar witnessed firsthand the horrors of totalitarianism in Hungary, and he traces here the developments of those ideologies which led to the subsequent horrors of the Twentieth century. This book is divided into chapters each focusing on different aspects of the intellectual as well as chapters on planetary coexistence and planetary ideology. Molnar traces the development of the intellectual from his beginnings in the medieval period in the dispute between realists and nominalists to his subsequent development into Marxist, progressive, and reactionary forms as well as the development of the American and European intellectual.

To begin, Molnar discusses the emergence of the intellectual, emphasizing the conflict that developed in medieval Catholicism between realist and nominalist philosophies. Molnar shows how modern times are distinguished from prior periods of history in that the "triple aim of Peace, Unity, and Prosperity" has finally become realizable. However, with these aims comes a grave responsibility. Subsequently, Molnar traces the development of the intellectual in the ruthless political philosophy of Machiavelli from within the nominalism of Marsilius of Padua and William of Occam. Molnar also shows how the Cartesian spirit developed eventually leading to the rise of the philosophes in the period of the French Revolution, the first true intellectuals. Next, Molnar turns his attention to the shaping of ideologies. Here, he argues against the philosophy of Rousseau and shows how this subsequently led to the development of Marxism and the absolute state. In three subsequent chapters, Molnar considers in turn the intellectual at once as Marxist, as progressive, and as reactionary. Molnar shows the utopian beliefs of Marxists, demonstrating their errors and showing how they lead to the most horrendous forms of totalitarianism. Molnar next turns his attention to progressives. Here, he considers the errors of a naïve belief in progress, often motivated by Darwinistic thinking. Molnar shows the errors of the progressivism of individuals such as the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin and the subsequent development his philosophy had on the progressive wing of the Catholic church. Molnar also considers existentialists such as Camus and Sartre. Molnar shows how Sartre particularly and other progressives could not sufficiently distance themselves from Marxism and eventually embraced the horrors of the Soviet state. Molnar also considers the philosophy of John Dewey and the role he played among other progressives such as Sidney Hook and Max Eastman. Following this Molnar turns his attention to the intellectual as reactionary. Here he distinguishes the conservative thinker from the capitalist and the communist. In particular, Molnar devotes a good deal of attention to the letters between de Toqueville and Gobineau. Molnar also examines the philosophy of Nietzsche and his relationship to Wagner. In addition, Molnar considers the writings of Dostoyevsky and his struggle with the idea of an all-powerful God as well as his rejection of the Roman Catholic Church. Molnar also considers Maurras, whose reaction against modernity was motivated by an admiration for the monarchy and the Catholic church, though he was to remain an atheist until his eventual conversion at his death. Finally, Molnar considers the relationship between reactionary intellectuals and fascism and Nazism. Molnar next devotes a chapter to ideology and social engineering. Here, he notes the profound failure of the intellectuals and the rise of the social engineer through an all-powerful technocratic state. Echoing Bernanos, Molnar writes against the technocrat and the social engineer showing the harm they have done to man's liberty. Molnar next devotes chapters to planetary coexistence and planetary ideologies. Here, he notes the rise of global superpowers, America and the Soviet Union (this book was first written in 1961). Next, Molnar concerns himself with the American intellectual and the European intellectual. Contrasting these distinct species of intellectual, Molnar notes how the American system was founded by the Puritans giving it a utopian origin. On the other hand, the individualist element remains strong within American culture. Contrasting this with the European intellectual, Molnar notes that for the European the United States remains a sort of temptation. He considers how the European intellectual was forced to discard Marxism and establish new foundations critical of mass society in general. Here, he considers existentialists Camus and Sartre contrasting the two and showing the reasons for their eventual breakup. He also considers other philosophers such as Heidegger, though his discussion of him is not nearly as long as he would have liked it to be (as noted in his preface). Finally, Molnar ends by considering the intellectual and the philosopher, noting the need for a return to philosophy to be achieved by the intellectual. Molnar brings out the contrast between intellectual and the philosopher and shows the need for faith as well as the errors of utopian thinking.

This book offers a profound understanding of the intellectual and his subsequent decline in the modern world. Molnar is philosophically very distinct and his writings elegantly portray the horrors of totalitarianism. Others have noted the so-called "opium of the intellectuals", in their readiness to embrace aberrant ideologies, and Molnar as well notes these distinctions.

The fragmentary calendar plate from Coligny (near Lyons) apparently dates to the second-century AD, although the Gaulish calendar engraved on this plate is plainly the result of a long transmission process. The 25-year-cycle calendar, the final system of this transmission process, probably originated early in the first-century BC, before Caesar's conquest. It is within this late pre-Roman period that the calendar took on its final form and notation to enter a two-century long transmission process. Since only 40% of the original Coligny calendar survives as a fragmentary mosaic, the reconstruction of the original whole depends upon recognizing repetitive patterns and filling in the missing sequences of these patterns. The most significant of these patterns is that discerned in the schemes of the TII and the N lunar/solar counting marks and their associated notation. Here the chronological cycles implied by these notational patterns are explained in detail. Also provided is a glossary of the functional and etymological significance of terms utilized in these daily notational patterns. The fragmentary calendar is brought to photographic completion utilizing the original wording and engraving found on the surviving fragments.