Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the Seas of China, by Barry Cunliffe (Oxford University Press, £30.00 / € 42.00) Barry Cunliffe, now Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Oxford University, is one of the most distinguished archaeologists of his generation. He is known not just as an excavator, but also as…
The Secret Life of Cows Rosamund Young, with a foreword by Alan Bennett Faber and Faber. £9.99 / €11.99 The Wisdom of Sheep and Other Animals Rosamund Young Faber and Faber, £7.99 / €9.50 Here in Ireland we are well aware of the importance of cattle to our history – is not the Gaelic…
Cold Porridge, Broken Promises and a Missing Dog: Notes from Nursing Home Advocacy Tony Carroll Scribe Consulting Services, €20.00 / £18.99; widely available on line and through shops It is something of a surprise that this deeply felt and engaging book had to be self-published, rather than appear from under one of the well known imprints.…
Paradise Lost: A Biography Alan Jacobs Princeton University Press, £20.00 / €22.99 He may be known to some readers as the author of a most interesting and arresting book, The Years of Our Lord 1943, in which he examines through the writings of a set of writers – C. S. Lewis, W. H Auden, Jacques…
Anyone seeking a serious and well informed account of vaudou can consult Les mysteres du vaudou, translated as Voodoo: The Search for the Spirit (Thames & Hudson / New Horizons, €14.70 / £9.75), by the Haitian sociologist Laënenc Hurbon, a trained Catholic theologian, who is now a Haitian academic. May Deren’s The Divine Horsemen (published in London…
time forgot Anne Heffernan (Buy the Book and other online resources, €15.00 / £13.50) Anne Heffernan is an Irish journalist with wide local experience, but the year she passed as a volunteer aid worker in a remote area of the Republic of Haiti was quite beyond her expectations. She flew out from Ireland by…
The Glenstal Prayerbook: A Benedictine Book of Prayer (Red Stripe Press, €14.99 / £13.00) Back in 2001 the first form of the Glenstal Prayerbook, then published by Columba Press, was a great popular success. It brought the old established prayer tradition of the Benedictine order out of the monastery and into the hands of…
Conversations in the Spirit: A Guide to the Synodal Method Juan A. Guerrero Alaves SJ & Oscar Martin López SJ, with a prologue by Pope Francis, translated by Austen Ivereigh Messenger Publications, €14.95 / The cover image of this book in a certain way sums up the idea behind the book as a whole. Through…
The Doré Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy Search Press, £19.00 / €20.50 Gustave Doré (1832-1883), a cradle Catholic born in the conflicted city of Strasbourg, was an artist whose anxious imagination was suffused with an engagement with the supernatural on many levels. Some years ago, I think in 2006, my wife and I on a visit…
Finding Mangan: The Lives and Afterlives of Ireland’s National Poet Bridget Hourican Gill Books, €22.99 / £17.50 James Clarence Mangan was not always destined to be Ireland’s ‘national poet’. That place at that time in the 1830s had been long and largely filled by Thomas Moore. Today Moore has a large and challenging statue…