Ireland Books

What a great book!Retold Irish Folklore accompanied by beautiful illustrations.Small glossary to help with the pronunciation of some Gaelic names.The story kept my 4 1/2 yr.old's attention (re-read many times), and made me laugh out loud. We loved it! My favorite line..."Finn overcame with wit and wisdom that which might never have been done by force." Words we should all live by!

Robert Byrd has completely captured the original folklore in this beautifully spun tale! This is such an excellent book to help teach your children at a young age some of the wonderful stories found in Irish Folk Lore! I absolutely love it and so does my 4 1/2 year old son!!!

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 � 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 � 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.

Many years ago I happened to visit the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. As an anthropologist who worked in Asia and taught in Australia, I wasn't extremely familiar with Florida history, but I thought I knew something about the Indians. I had even spent a couple days on the Mikasuki reservation many years before then. Florida's native Americans were the Seminoles and Mikasuki, right ? Wrong ! I was stunned to learn of the true pattern on that fortuitous visit. By the 1760s, Florida's original population of some 350,000 had totally disappeared, the last few survivors dying as refugees in Cuba.

On a subsequent visit to Gainesville, a couple years ago, I bought Jerald Milanich's book, planning to get a more complete picture. I am very glad I did. This is a most excellent book, written for people who may not have professional backgrounds in archaeology, anthropology or history. The author hits just the right note. Everything is explained most clearly and readably. The twelve thousand year history that came to an end in the 18th century is traced through archeological discoveries. The great number of maps is a delight, while he includes some interesting photographs too. Milanich describes Florida as it must have been when the Spaniards arrived in the early 1500s. He tells of their efforts at exploration, colonization, at conversion, and their brutal repression of resistance, which coupled with wave upon wave of new diseases, almost completely wiped out Florida's native population. The French attempted briefly to colonize the area too. You will learn that "Florida" once extended up the Georgia coast into South Carolina. This area was known as Guale. For those of us reared on Anglo-centric American history, Milanich's book is an eyeopener. The life around the Spanish missions is depicted, the life that was destroyed finally by raids from the north by Carolina colonists, English forces, and allied Indians. These violent incursions, which brought thousands of Indian slaves to the Carolinas or sent them to be sold in the West Indies, finished the awful job of genocide. Florida is a land of ghosts. Today, amidst the urban sprawl and commercial mess of much of that state, nobody gives a thought to the Calusa, the Apalachee, the Timucua, the Jororo, the Tocobaga, the Mayaca, the Tequesta, and so many others, some whose very names may not survive. But when you paddle down one of those palmetto-lined rivers, past turtles and alligators, thrilled to see deer or otter, herons and ducks, or when you visit the former capital of Spanish Florida, St. Augustine, you might give a thought to the original Floridians. Florida is still dotted with archaeological reminders of them. Milanich has not neglected to tell us where. I suspect this is THE book on Florida Indian history.

Mr. Milanich has really outdone himself. His descriptions of the native Floridians and their interactions with Europeans is forthright, honest, and most of all backed with excellent research. This book is a great addition to anyone's library, especially if you're from Florida.

"Hitler and Goering were once out driving. Passing through a village, they ran over a pig. Goering thought he should find the farmer and apologize for what had happened. He was gone a very long time and received very fine hospitality. When he returned, Hitler asked why he had stayed so long. 'Well, there was so much celebration in the house over what I told them,' Goering replied, 'and finally I had to join in.' 'What did you tell them?' 'That the pig was dead.' This was one of hundreds of jokes told by the Norwegians from 1940 until 1945. While the phenomenom of occupation humor has certainly not been ignored, the role it played in developing a resistance mentality among the Norwegian people has until now been largely unexamined. This humor was expressed in overtly anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi jokes, but it was also found in snide replies, double-entendres, insinuating newspaper advertisements that were not understood by the occupying forces, children's stories, and even Christmas cards. Kathleen Stokker, extending an earlier study by Magne Skodvin, observes that "wartime humor granted a voice to those deprived of free speech, discouraged the undecided from hasty attachment to Nazism, and helped the initially amorphus group of individuals opposed to Nazism to develop a sense of solidarity." Norway was a neutral country in 1940, and just as it had done during World War One, it hoped to remain neutral. Geopolitical realities, however, including the German desire to control access to Swedish iron mines, made Norway and Denmark Hitler's first victims following the end of the Phony War in April of 1940. The Norwegians did not surrender. King Haakon VII established a government in exile in England, and the Norwegian people would wage one of the bravest and most effective resistance campaigns of the war. The popular image of Norwegian resistance has been created by films such as "The Heroes of Telemark," but there were tens of thousands of ordinary Norwegians who resisted in more subtle ways, even if it were only to wear a red cap in defiance of their occupiers. Stokker points out, however, that the image of a people united against oppression is only partly true. There were many Norwgians who did acccept and serve the new National Government headed by Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the Norwegian Nazi Party. But these people were for the most part shunned, and Stokker points out with brillliant originality the way the resisters used humor to debase the collaborators. Stokker, a professor of Norwegian at Luther College, is the author of the most widely used Norwegian-language textbook in America. She draws upon a large number of interviews with survivors of the Occupation, archives in the Norwegian Resistance Museum and the University of Oslo, and "joke notebooks" kept by women who experienced the event. It is a delightful book,well-crafted and historically meticulous. As other societies have discovered, oppression can be endured with humor, for it is a valuable form of psychological warfare. The Norwegians developed that humor, as Stokker so aptly proves, and in the process maintained the spirit that was necessary to prevail. As one reads the book, and looks at the drawings, posters, and cartoons, one gains a deep appreciation for the courage of a people. One also gets a good laugh! Dr. Gerald D. Anderson Department of History North Dakota State University

"Hitler and Goering were once out driving. Passing through a village, they ran over a pig. Goering thought he should find the farmer and apologize for what had happened. He was gone a very long time and received very fine hospitality. When he returned, Hitler asked why he had stayed so long. 'Well, there was so much celebration in the house over what I told them,' Goering replied, 'and finally I had to join in.' 'What did you tell them?' 'That the pig was dead.'" This was one of hundreds of jokes told by the Norwegians during German occupation from 1940 until 1945. While the phenomenon of occupation humor has certainly not been ignored, the role it played in developing a resistance mentality among the Norwegian people has until now been largely unexamined. This humor was expressed in overtly anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi jokes, but it was also found in snide replies, double-entendres, insinuating newspaper advertisements that were not understood by the occupying forces, children's stories, and even Christmas cards. Kathleen Stokker, extending an earlier study by Magne Skodvin, observes that "wartime humor granted a voice to those deprived of free speech, discouraged the undecided from a hasty attachment to Nazism, and helped the initially amorphous group of individuals opposed to Nazism to develop a sense of solidarity." Norway was a neutral country in 1940, and just as it had done during World War One, it hoped to remain neutral. Geopolitical realities, however, including the German desire to control access to Swedish iron mines, made Norway and Denmark Hitler's first victims following the end of the Phony War in April of 1940. The Norwegians did not surrender. King Haakon VII established a government in exile in England, and the Norwegian people would wage one of the bravest and most effective resistance campaigns of the war. The popular image of Norwegian resistance has been created by such films as "The Heroes of Telemark," but there were also tens of thousands of Norwegians who resisted in more subtle ways, even if it were only to wear a red cap in defiance of their oppressors. Stokker points out, however, that the image of a people united against oppression is only partly true. There were many Norwegians who did accept and serve the new National Government headed by Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the Norwegian Nazi Party. But these people were for the most part shunned, and Stokker points out with brilliant originality the way the resisters used humor to debase the collaborators. Stokker, a professor of Norwegian at Luther College, is the author of the most widely used Norwegian-language textbook in America. She draws upon a large number of interviews with survivors of the Occupation, archives in the Norwegian Resistance Museum and the University of Oslo, and "joke notebooks" kept by women who experienced the event. It is a delightful book, well crafted and historically meticulous. As other societies have discovered, oppression can be met with humor, for it is a valuable form of psychological warfare. The Norwegians were able to develop that humor, as Stokker so aptly proves, and in thr process maintained the spirit necessary to prevail. As one reads the book, and looks at the drawings, posters, children's books, and cartoons, one gains a deep appreciation for the courage of a people. One also gets a good laugh! Dr. Gerald D. Anderso Department of History North Dakota State University

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.

More of a coffee table book, it gives brief descriptions of the amazingly widescale contributions of Polish troops in WWII. Worth it just for the pictures.

During my studies of central Europe, I have been thoroughly impressed by the ability of Poland to fend off enemies much more powerful than they for over 1000 years. This book is a testament to those that fell in the shadow of their ancestors, who fought off Mongols, Tatars, Cossacks, Teutons, Turks, Transilvanians, Hungarians, Romanians, Czechs, Swedes, Russians, Austrians, Prussians and Nazis.