Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail, £14.99) Booth, by the American author Karen Joy Fowler, is a novel about the family of actor Junius Brutus Booth. The most famous – or infamous – of his children was John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Booth père (1796-1852) was an Englishman who abandoned a wife and…
Great Hatred: The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP by Ronan McGreevy (Faber, £16.99/€19.99) Sir Henry Wilson, Ulster Unionist MP at Westminster and former Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), was shot dead by two English-born Irish Republicans – Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan – outside his home in London on June…
Ireland’s Great Famine, Britain’s Great Failure William H. A. Williams (Anthem Press, £80.00/€94.00) It is impossible to write about certain matters, even in a scholarly context, without feelings of outrage. The Irish Famine of 1845-49, the subject of this new book by William H. A. Williams, an American historian who taught at University College Dublin…
Irish lives in America Edited by Liz Evers and Niav Gallagher (Royal Irish Academy, €19.95/£18/$25) On this day every year Irish thoughts turn without fail to our relatives and friends in the United States. In reciprocation, President Joe Biden has this year issued a special proclamation from the White House declaring March 2022 as Irish-American…
Ulysses: a reader’s odyssey by Daniel Mulhall (New Island Books, €15.95) This book is a delightful, chatty introduction to the wonderful world of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It is written by Daniel Mulhall, an Irish diplomat for more than 40 years and now Ireland’s ambassador to the United States of America. In the prologue to his…
Haughey by Gary Murphy (Gill Books, €27.99/£25.99) The distinguished philosopher, Sir Anthony Kenny, wrote apropos of an encounter with Charles J. Haughey that “on no other occasion in my life has anyone, with a straight face, told me so many lies that he knew were lies, and that he knew I knew were lies”. Many…
Birth of a State; the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Micheál Ó Fathartaigh and Liam Weeks (Irish Academic Press, €19.95/£17.99) The Treaty: the gripping story of the negotiations that brought about Irish independence and led to the Civil War, Gretchen Friemann (Merrion Press, €16.95) Apart from two commemorative stamps issued by An Post, the centenary of the signing of…
Midnight in London: The Anglo-Irish Treaty Crisis, 1921 by Colum Kenny (Eastwood Books, €9.99) Scholars and others continue to mull over the minutiae of the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed in the early hours of the morning on December 6, 1921. Even now a hundred years later, there is a great deal…
Between two Hells: the Irish Civil War by Diarmaid Ferriter (Profile Books, €20/€24.69) Felix M. Larkin How does a nation mark the centenary of a civil war? This is a problem which we in Ireland have to confront in 2022. Prof. Diarmaid Ferriter’s advice in this book is that we “need to factor in restraint” and…