Ireland Books

Yanky brings to light what all folks who have asked themselves the question "do I have what it takes to strike out on my own as an entrepreneur?" Do you have the fire in the belly? The passion in the pit (of your gut) The real guage of success is if you can make the adjustment from the security of the world of traditional 9-5 work (ladder world) to the land of freedom. Yanky's book makes you ask yourself the critical questions. I have witnessed this book's ability to change peoples lives.

I recommend it highly, and if you ever get the chance to see Yanky in person, don't pass it up you will be impacted and enlightened by the experience.

This book is simply wonderful! If you have ever wondered about the emotions that prompted you to want your own business, or if you feel displaced by your desire to run your own business or even if you aren't sure that owning a business is for you.....READ THIS BOOK! It will not tell you how to start a business, but for those who feel unfulfilled in their 9 to 5 it will help you learn about yourself, your needs and what's possible for your future. Not to mention that it's an easy read, it's clever and you will see all of your friends, family and coworkers within the anecdotes contained within. I loved this book. Not just for entrepreurs either!!!!

If you enjoy armchair travel and more specifically armchair long distance walking, then this should be the book for you. If in addition, you enjoy laughing out loud or at least snorting appreciatively, then this is certainly the book for you.

Mark Wallington has a keen sense of the ridiculous and with his canine companion Boogie, sets out to tackle the South West Coast Path covering much of Devon and Cornwall in England. Their encounters and obstacles and joys are recorded with such humour that this book is diffcult to put down and in many ways reminds me of the writing of Bill Bryson.

Do they survive and make the end of the trail - well you'll just have to get hold of the book to find out!

"Walkies" is the first of the three-book set of the author's hikes around England with his unusual dog Boogie. This is the best book of the series and well worth the read.

At the time of the Falklands War, the author decided to hike 500 miles around the southwest coast of Britain. To say the least, he knows absolutely nothing about hiking and camping outdoors, but he knows, first and foremost, he must take a dog ý Boogie in this case, who could care less. They are both unsuited and inexperienced for a long hike, but they both survive in a comical excursion that will you leave laughing to the very end.

What makes the book so enjoyable was the dog ý Boogie. This is a dog who never knows a stranger. He goes for the hike despite knowing his master is a total fool for undertaking such endeavor. His master may go without food, but Boogie never goes without.

Read about their walkies around the southwest coast of England. You will learn a lot about travel but also much about Boogie.

A darkly violent Fellinesque riff on the Bosnian war, this "graphic novel," by Joe Sacco is a fast read, a noirish examination of the relationship between a parachute journalist and the necessary local 'fixer' who serves as a local contact and makes it possible for the journalist to drop into a foriegn country and get a story. In this case, the local turns out to be a questionable ex-fighter whose war stories are both more and less true than appearances indicate. The fixer, a troubled ex-fighter scorned by his former comrades and spurned because of his ethnic background, is a terrific character, evocative of both the unresolved issues behind the Balkan wars as well as the marginalized citizens anywhere made exiles in their own land.

Just to be clear, this is not a graphic novel, as some people are saying. It is graphic non-fiction, or graphic reportage, occupying a gray area somewhere between newsprint, photojournalism, memoir, cartooning, and essay. Sacco's first such book on Bosnia, Safe Area Gorazde, is a classic -- and those who found it compelling will certainly want to read this account of his 2001 return to Sarajevo. Aided by a Guggenheim fellowship, Sacco returned to do followup research and find old friends to see how they were getting along in peacetime. In his attempt to learn more about the siege of Sarajevo and the and its aftermath, he reconnects with an paramilitary veteran who had been his "fixer" on his previous trip in 1995. In war zones and trouble spots throughout the world, fixers are the oil that lubricates the machinery of international journalism. They are the ones who steer journalists to the right translator, hotel, driver, interviewer, clean hooker, alcohol, location, etc. -- for a few hundred in hard currency per day.

Sacco's fixer was Neven, a Bosnian Serb who loves his city and fought in one of the many ad hoc brigades that were assembled by charismatic men in the early days of the war before a real Bosnian army was established.  An outsize character, Neven becomes a kind of lens through which Sacco tries to understand the war's very confusing impact on Sarajevo. The book hopscotches between various stages of the war and the present in a kaleidoscopic jumble of images, confusing nicknames, and impenetrable mix of fact and myth. Through Neven, Sacco tells the fragmentary tale of some of the more prominent warlords (almost all of whom were shady prewar characters), and of their sometimes heroic, sometimes despicable activities during the siege. To a certain extent, they are the subject of the book, populist characters who took it upon themselves to create personal armies to fight the separatist Serbs when there was no central government or army to do so (most of the Yugoslav army supplies were handed over to Serbia following the dissolution of Yugoslavia). Of course, many of these patriotic men were also probably interested in enriching themselves, and as the war dragged on, attempts were made to incorporate them into the regular army and police and things got rather messy. As Sacco recounts, many of the "facts" surrounding various killings, atrocities, and profiteering by the warlords will forever remain obscured by the fog of war, and the need for politicians to wash their hands of those dirty times.

At the same time, what becomes increasingly interesting is the relationship between Sacco and Neven, and the plausibility of Neven's endless stories about what it was like "back then." Neven is a down and out character who owes money all over town, and Sacco clearly feels guilty about walking around with bundles of Deutchmarks, while his fixer is real-life war veteran. The subtle (and not so subtle) assaults on Sacco's wallet become a running theme, and are an interesting window on the less glamorous side of being a foreign correspondent. At the same time, as Sacco spends more and more time in Sarajevo, he meets more and more people who cast doubts on Neven's veracity. He's certainly known all over town, and certainly did fight in the war, but there's also clearly a gulf between his stories and the truth. And as a Serb, he's also somewhat of a pariah in his own home city, his apartment is seized by connected refugees, and a general antipathy for Serbs hover around him.

Ultimately, readers looking for a clear understanding of who was who, and what was what during the war, are going to be frustrated -- and are perhaps missing the whole point. This book is all about the fog of war, the strange mutations of time and place that raise certain men to power and then cast them aside, as well as the guilt and confusion of being an outsider looking in

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!