Irish-American Books

The first book on contemporary British feminist drama to marry cultural theory to dramatic text whilst simultaneously exploring the aspect of performativity. Foucault and Deleuze's theories are used to foreground aspects of contemporary British culture.

Dr Lizbeth Goodman, author of Contemporary Feminist Theatres says: '[Dimple Godiwala] focuses primarily on texts read in political and social context, and shines some illuminating spotlights on performance as well...'

I was very impressed by Jack O'Briens book British Brutality in Ireland. The facts have been well researched and well presented. The book draws on eye witness accounts, historical documents, ancient archives, personal testimonies and thorough historical research by both catholic and protestant historians. He describes the British involvement in Ireland from 1169 to the present day. It gives eye witness accounts of the terrible cruelties and injustices inflicted on the Irish people over many centuries. He describes how all of this was covered up and hidden by British propaganda. The book also shows up the serious flaws in the British criminal justice system which are a disgrace to Britain which prides itself as a modern so called "democratic nation". I learnt quite a lot about Ireland and my Irish ancestors. If you have any Irish ancestry you will learn the terrible truth about what happened to your Irish ancestors in this book. The book is a historical masterpiece. If you want to understand present circumstances in Ireland and Irish history, Jack O'Brien's historical masterpiece has to be read.

This book is for students but I found it easy to read and very interesting indeed. It gives you a good and balanced account of the development of early British settlement in Americas. Well worth reading and referring to.

This is an awesome play in its original form. Originally seen in London's West End winning 2 olivier awards, this is a spellbinding play that sets a pitch that is carried forward til the dramatic climax at the end.

Lets hope that this play makes it to broadway sometime soon.

Overall - a great read and some great scenes to play for actors who want powerful emotionally charged material.

Buy it!!

David M. Emmons, in The Butte Irish, examines the development of Butte, Montana, as an Irish town, tracing the story from the Potato Famine to about 1925. He focuses on two major questions: (a) What made Butte such a popular destination for Irish immigrants, both directly from Ireland and from other Irish areas of the US? and, (b) How did the development of an Irish enclave in Butte affect the development of the city? He goes on to examine the evolution of class relations within the Irish in Butte. Emmons describes Butte as a unique location in America for the study of an ethnic community. He argues that the town developed in such a way and at such a time that it was one of the only towns in the country to have a strong working-class, immigrant community in a position of major influence and power. There were several keys that made this path of city evolution possible. The first was the switch from silver and gold mining to copper production in the 1870's. This is key for Butte's "Irishness" on several levels. First, because of the large capital investment required for copper mining, Butte was forced to industrialize to a much greater extent than other major gold and silver mining camps of the West. Thus, Butte was the only one of these mining camps to become a major city. Immigrants from many of these camps came to Butte in large numbers. The timing of the beginning of Butte's copper era is a second major factor. The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840's caused huge numbers of Irish to immigrate to America. In the years immediately following the famine, the Irish were nearly forty percent of those immigrating to the United States. Large numbers of Irish continued to immigrate in the next thirty years, supplying the US with many unskilled workers. Many of these Irish went to the mining camps of the west, the coal mines of Pennsylvania, or the copper mines of Michigan, because mining was one of the only industries they were familiar with. As many of the western mining camps became "played out," or ran out of viable ore, in the late nineteenth century, the Irish looked to the developing Butte. Because Butte was becoming an established city only when the Irish started going there, it did not have a previously existing community of entrenched middle class Americans, nor did it have a prior political structure. This is another key difference between Butte and other towns with sizable Irish populations such as Boston or San Francisco. In pre-existing towns and cities, the middle class often looked down on those of the working class, or at least had control of the political and social structure of the area. It is a well-known fact that Marcus Daly was one of the main reasons so many Irish came to Butte. Daly was the owner of the Anaconda Mining Company, and a strong Irish nationalist. His hiring policies were famous throughout the West, and even in Ireland, as being very generous to the Irish. Emmons lays out these reasons, detailing them extensively. His research was thorough, utilizing "two full carloads" of primary materials including records of Butte churches and Irish social organizations, letters, newspapers. Also cited in Emmons' bibliography are extensive interviews and secondary sources. Emmons is just as thorough in his treatment of the second question. He considers the miners of Butte on many levels. One of the more interesting themes of the book is the discussion of conflicting loyalties within the Irish enclave of the Mining City. The author frames this as the question of whether the people considered themselves "working Irish-Americans" or "Irish-American workers." He examines the politics of the struggling Ireland and its relationship with England, the structure of the Butte social organizations and the way their roles and importances, both absolute and relative to one another, changed and grew during this period, and changing demographics within the Irish and the rest of Butte-Silver Bow. The only complaint to be lodged against The Butte Irish is the author's occasional use of difficult sentence structure. I can't find the quote I was going to use here, but there were a few to choose from. The Butte Irish is a well-written and well-executed account of the development of a town and community, offering many insights into working class ethnography, labor relations, Montana history, and Irish history, among others. Emmons has managed to cover aspects of all these areas, even while maintaining a strong focus and cohesiveness throughout the book.

Killarney Clary is an accomplished poet whose work has been published in such publications as the 'American Poetry Review', 'Colorado Review', Missouri Review', 'Ploughshares', 'Yale Review', and many more. Her work is hallmarked by its spare and lucid prose poems in which she describes and sometimes celebrates aspects of our contemporary landscape, dream fragments, human loss, and the unknowns of our existence in an almost 'stream of consciousness' style of presentation. "By Common Salt" is a highly recommended compendium of her work deserving of as wide a readership as possible and is especially recommended to poetry enthusiasts who appreciate how the deft employment of words can evoke lasting and lingering emotions in the mind and emotions of the reader. 'An old woman alone in a white car on Fletcher peers into a pink bakery box as she waits at the signal in twilight. I'm anxious to be home, talking. I'm afraid of the smell of damp metal, a chill that rises into my scalp a thud against the wall at three a.m.; the phone keeps ringing. When you only have one thing, you're bound to hate it.'

As a lifelong and devoted student of Lewis -- and one who has read, re-read, written about, and lectured on Mere Christianity -- I was startled and deeply gratified to learn that the master conceived his touchstone idea, composed the masterpiece that conveys it, and perfected his popular, lean, direct apologetic style under what can only be regarded as the tutelage of the BBC. The late Justin Phillips (who died before completing his book: the manuscript was edited and brought to publication by his daughter Laura Treneer) first provides a genuinely riveting war-time context as only a lifelong BBC-man could. He then captures, with ample narrative skill and astonishingly adroit quotations from correspondence, the "Beeb's" persistence and scalpel-like judgment, as well as CSL's reservations, vexations, achievement, and finally his overwhelming success. Along the way the reader gets a concrete feel for Lewis's travel, work-habits, friendships and homelife which, though not entirely new, are utterly fresh (for example, the contributions of Jill Freud . . . ) And as a bonus we are treated to a chapter on Dorothy L. Sayers and the BBC: The corporation was sorely overmatched! From now on, Richard Baxter + CSL = Mere Christianity must become Baxter + Lewis X the BBC = Mere Christianity and a good deal of the master's pellucid style.

This book is a wonderful start to anyone wanting to look at the idea of the Gothic. I'm a graduate student in English, and this book has been a great tool in helping me with my course work. The book gives you a good overview of the various types and periods of Gothic, including the more modern topics such as films and video games. It is a good starting off point that can help direct your scholarship in the right direction, as well as making you literate as to what exactly the Gothic is and where it has been. I highly recommend it.

The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing is a series of 15 academically-oriented essays by 15 authors divided into 3 Parts. Part I "Surveys" contains 5 essays that provide a general survey of the literature from 1500 to the present. I found these to be the most interesting as it provides historical context and the most important works to know about. Part II "Sites" contains 7 essays that are surveys also, but for specific regions: Arabia, Amazon, Tahiti, Congo, Scotland/Ireland, Calcutta, California. These are more detailed and focused, my only complaint is there were not more surveys for other regions. Finally Part III "Topics" contains 3 essays covering more theoretical and academic subjects: essays on gender, ethnography and theory. I found these the least interesting as they are for those with a more specialized background (ie. literary theory, gender studies, etc.). In addition there is a lengthy Introduction providing an overview of the book. Each essay contains footnotes and a bibliography. There is a chronological list of the works selected by the authors as the most significant at the end of the book which is a great resource.

As each essay is written by someone different I found some better than others (as followed my interest level in certain places and periods). The essays are not entirely stand-alone there is some cross referencing between them which forms a whole work. The first five surveys mainly focus on English authors only, and there is little discussed about non-traditional narratives (slave narratives, etc..) such as can be found in the recent Oxford Anthology (2005). As a literary history of travel writing this is a wonderful reference and I recommend it highly, both for the professional scholar (I am not) and the interested fan of travel literature who wants to find the most important works and place them into historical context.

Since I am the first to review this book, it is important that I let you know just how much information is in here.

Writers - poets, novelists, playwrights, theologians, philosophers, economists, naturalists, scientists, essayists, critics, and historians

Individual plays, poems, novels, and other works

Literary groups or schools - I.E. the Lake Poets, the Beats, the Movement, and the Black Mountain School

Wider literary movements - I.E. neoclassicism, Romanticism, modernism, and post modernism

Critical schools or movements - I.E. the New Criticism, structuralism, post structuralism, deconstruction, and ethical criticism

Literary genres - I.E. comedy, and tragedy, fable, farce and melodrama

Poetic forms and sub-genres of drama and fiction - I.E. acrostic, the elegy, the revenge tragedy, and the Gothic novel

Critical terms - I.E. metaphor, symbol, dialogism, intertextuality, and unreliable narrator

Rhetorical terms - I.E. anaphora, bathos, chiasmus, synecdoche, and zeugma

Theaters and theater companies - I.E. the Globe, the King's Men, the Federal Theater Project, and the Sistren Theater Collective

Literary magazines - I.E. The Quarterly Review and Punch, The New Masses, and Staffrider

So, as you can see, the list is quite extensive, helpful, and interesting.