Irish-American Books

This is my favorite book, and I'm only thirteen years old. I read this book all the time. If you don't get this book your crazy.

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R121LU32K6LEV0 Here's a book trailer for The Hidden Adult.

I came across this book as I was preparing a presentation on 'divine hiddenness' for a philosophy of religion course. I bought it, thinking it would be a philosophical discussion on the subject. It isn't, not directly.

It was originally a series of lectures delivered during the 1930's, updated and revised for print in the 1950's by the author himself. It talks about the role of the artist, the problem (described by Tillich) in modern culture of man being reduced to "a mere thing", where the world has been arranged so that "everything is a means to ends which are themselves means", without any ultimate goal, and how the true artist offers mankind a vision to grow beyond this.

He also explores the relation between the vision/philosophy/activity of the various authors and the Christian vision/philosophy/activity towards life, at first in relation to virtue (courage, discipline), to the reality of evil as something that cannot be explained away, but must be confronted (this was hauntingly well done), to the experience of the eternal within the temporal (mostly Eliot), some kind of awakening/conversion (all the authors), the corrosiveness and destruction of rationalism of any sort (everyone but Hemingway), and redemption (mostly Warren). It wasn't overdone or proselytizing, it was an accurate and fair appraisal of the authors themselves (Hemingway is _not_ made into a Christian, etc.). I actually found it very corrective and illuminating for my own understanding of these things, it made them much more concrete, manifest, less obscure and theoretical, less campy and sub-cultured (I was an Anglican Christian derascinating from Protestant Evangelicalism at the time I read the book).

The conclusion again briefly revisits the role of the artist within a society as one who offers you a vision of reality and explores it, helps you encounter it; whereas most of what passes for art today is really kitsch, a narcotic playing on assumed sympathies, entertainment rolled off a factory line that deadens the mind and dulls the wits. He notes how these authors bring the reader to a new encounter with reality, and the author himself did this for me in the process, while whetting my appetite to read the authors he writes about.

I can't more highly recommend it. I would also read Adorno's _Critical Models_ along with this.

Unique Reference Work
This book is unique and by far the best I have seen. In its scope, its historical depth and detail, its friendliness, the Poddar and Johnson book will inevitably become the standard reference work. It will be of use not only in postcolonial studies but for those that come from other disciplines like cultural studies, literature, history, anthropology, and international relations. The competitors-- the Ray and the Lazarus volumes-- chart the usual territory in a very limited way and make no effort to invite the uninitiated. There must be at least 100 more books that spout postcolonial theory but it is rare indeed for a book to offer the wide historical picture across different regions of the world and link it so intimately to literary and cultural production as well as our contemporary concerns.
It will be a long time before this can be replaced.

I have all of Tomarken's books. As a Johnson hobbyist, it encourages me to see how carefully Tomarken has studied his legacy. The last few books were about Johnson himself, but now Tomarken is using his quick wit and sharp intelligence to survey Johnson's legacy as it exists in criticism.

I think Tomarken would be the first to admit that all criticism competes with the work it studies; this work, then, has the difficult yet enviable task of contending with both the titan Johnson himself and the nearly equally titanic bulk of those who would review, praise, or belittle him.

Tomarken doesn't suffer fools glady, and the book is worth reading for no other reason than the facility with which he dispatches the ignorant, the ill-informed, and the insipid.

All in all, not really a book for the Harry Potter set, or even for the idiots who have admitted Alice Walker and E.L. Doctorow to the literary canon - rather, this is a a bonsai of a book, obsessively groomed, fanatically detailed, lovingly grown to maturity.

Of his friend Tom Pickard, Allen Ginsberg said the following: "Young Tom Pickard for years ran the Morden Tower readings in Newcastle, G.B., and from early 1960's on was chief friend host & proponent of new wave American poetics--Creeley, Dorn, Duncan, post-William Carlos Williams visitors passing thru his Northumbria. I am an old admirer of his poetry and believe he's one of the livest, truest poets of Great Britain. Under guidance from his friend the elder Basil Bunting, he's writ poetry with condensation, sharp focus and local speech directness in lineage joining Willliams and 'Geordie' lyric vernacular."

In "A Home for Wayward Girls" (New Issues $14.00), the poet Kevin Boyle takes us on a journey that is as well planned and arranged as an exhibit at the city art museum of Boyle's beloved Philadelphia.
The book begins with poems like "Predilection", a work which teaches the reader to look covertly with overt eyes on the simple other end of simple actions and events. It ceases immediately the idea that a poetry collection should meditate on a theme, and rather throws the whole show in reverse and begs the question of "what would happen if we drove backwards through history? Was it really all about sex and God?"
At the heart of the first poems is a love for the dark beast of sex and how we drape and worship it in flowing robes and then try to undress it with our eyes. Boyle's Catholicism is not left out in the meditation, and these poems question again and again the divinity we find in life's joinings, whether they be physical or spiritual, and whether their deathlessness has really been infused by us.
The collection continues with ideas on the man's role in childbirth and the fact that a man is involved through history and worry, without really being a party to a child's bloody and scientific debut. At the same time, he is unafraid to turn sentimental when writing about the adoption of his daughter, Marina, from the countryside of Russia in the poem, "Russian Child, Nesting Doll."
This collection is the product of someone walking, as closely as possible, the line between the introspective life and the life lived openly, with all of the body ready to be touched with heat or cold. It reels between the ephemeral this will only happen once feeling of a daughter left for the first time for school so that the parents can have sex, and the seemingly endless years in which our parents and then ourselves get old and die.
Humor is embraced with "The Death of the Drama Poem", where Boyle does not make the mistake of writing humor poetry, but rather writes poetic humor about how words and images can be intertwined and how it does not take a bard to say what a bard should say.
The fourth and final section is a full-circle idea, where you remember the beginning poem "The Lullaby of History" on page one of the book while you read about a man's own history. This final section talks about the heavy death of parents and the feather light life of children, and so talks about losing an entire history of Ireland in one's past and yet making a future in our children with all that we've gladly done for them. It doesn't relate the sadness of the slow breaking down of the body as it simply shows it, with bedsores and taking mother to the bathroom. Just when you have learned again to love your parents you find yourself on Noah's Arch, over hearing, along with all the animals of creation, Noah and his wife screwing away the virtual loss of humanity.
In this collection women wear silk kimonos and teenagers slow dance. The German language begins to explain some things. You are an American looking at the once troubled and now quiet countryside of Ireland and then reclined on a sofa with your wife wondering about Cezanne's model paper flowers. The book is a story of stories, a liturgy of sorts where the final feeling one gets is that feeling of having studied, in amazing detail over years, the idea of who we are and how we've come here, and where, now, we will take these ragged bodies, these seasoned hearts of ours?

Most books of quotations contain more that their fair share of duds, this one doesn't. The funniest book that I have ever read, but not to be read in public as you are certain to laugh out loud and get carted away by the sanity police.

Few collections include so wide a variety of epigrams, satire and simply nasty poems as Kenneth Baker's "I Have No Gun But I Can Spit" (the title is from Auden). Selections run from classic Latin (Horace in translation) to Pope and Swift and a good many poets less well known than they should be.

tis is a wonderful journey into the mind of boston's greatest politician. it s filled with genuine warmth and compassion for humanity. i am so glad that mayor curley was able to write his side of the story. the greatest compliment to the unforgettable james michael curley. " to the mayor of the poor in the hospital he built, massachusetts.