Looking back over the past year of their reading and reviewing some of our regular contributors have selected what seem to them to be the best reading of 2013, a varied and wide-ranging choice.
Peter Costello
Christmas books
Peter Costello examines the season’s offerings
Christmas books for children
Peter Costello looks at some offerings for younger readers.
Religious books for children
Christmas, like Easter, is a season of the year when parents and relatives make an effort to buy children something religious, such as the story of the Nativity or a life of Christ. It would be easy to recommend some books on the Nativity such as Brian Wildsmith's now classic books A Christmas Story with…
The light of other days
Donnybrook: A History (Ireland in Old Photographs) by Beatrice Doran (History Press, €17.99 / £16.99)
Portrait of the Marble City
Hidden Kilkenny: Knaves, Knights and Norman Abbots by John Keane (Mercier Press, €19.99 / £17.50)
The quiet eye of a Jesuit
Father Browne’s Laois edited by E. E. O’Donnell (Messenger Publications, €15.00 hb / £17.64)
The life and thought of Canon Sheehan
Canon Sheehan of Doneraile 1852-1913: Outlines for a Literary Biography by James O’Brien (Smenos, €23.00 plus p+p / £19.50 plus p+p ; ISBN-13: 978-0957552166; smenosbooks@yahoo.co.uk )
Tragedy of a special kind
In the week since our last issue the world has been marking the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. This has evoked many articles, and a Hollywood film, Parkland, about the immediate aftermath of the crime. We all of us remember where we were when we heard the…
A critque of imperialism
Irish involvement with Africa is all too often seen though the work of missionaries, especially in Nigeria and Kenya. But this reissue of a book by the late Wicklow novelist Gerald Hanley, better known for The Year of the Lion and Gilligan’s Last Elephant, deals with a very different area and very different kind of…