The World of Books On January 20, 1947, The Times of London carried a short report: “NEW YORK. At 10.15 a.m. yesterday Mayor O’Dwyer,  of New York, received a telegram from Mr John McCann, Lord Mayor of Dublin, which read as follows: ‘Poet Eoghan Roe Ward dying. Bananas may save life. Is it possible send…

Felix 
M. 
Larkin The Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, 1900-18 by Conor Mulvagh (Manchester University Press, £75.00) The centenary commemoration of the 1916 Rising last year was marred by the curious incident of the banners on the facade of the Bank of Ireland building in College Green. These banners were a minimalist attempt to commemorate…

My Memoirs by Peter Malone (Kingdom Books, €25.00; all receipts will go to charity; for details contact Loretto Dalton, lorettodalton@gmail.com) This is a delightful memoir by a proud son of Dundalk. Born in 1944, Peter Malone was educated at the Dominican Friary Primary School and St Mary’s Marist College.  Both sides of his family were…

Edith Stein:
Selected Writings ed. Marian Maskular CPS, foreword by Sarah Borden Shareky (Paulist Press, £35.99) Edith Stein (St Theresa Benedicta) is very much a witness to faith for the modern world. It perhaps significant that her philosophical thesis in 1920 was entitled ‘The Problem of Empathy’, for empathy, the sympathetic love and concern for others…

Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World by Marc Raboy (Oxford University Press, £25.00) The Vatican is said to be slow to communicate its views on issues, due to its own bureaucracy. But this is only partially true. L’Osservatore Romano, for instance, was founded in 1861 to propagate the claims of the Vatican under threat…

Stations of the Cross Then and Now by Denis McBride  (Redemptorist Publications, £15.00) As Easter approaches Denis McBride’s new book is perhaps the sort of contemplative book which many Christians will want to read, in which the Via Dolorosa is explored and exemplified in modern terms, though it would be true to say that the…

A Single Headstrong Heart by Kevin Myers (Lilliput Press, € 20.00) On the cover of this affecting, beautifully-written memoir is a photograph of young Kevin Myers, a parrot on his shoulder; beside him, smiling cautiously, is his father Willie, who was a GP. They were on their way to the Cup Final at Wembley when…

Joe Carroll The World of Books Hillary Clinton won more popular votes than Donald Trump in the US Presidential election but he won more Electoral College votes under the system devised by an 18th-Century intellectual elite, some of whom were slave-owners. So is he the democratically elected President? Eamon de Valera did not believe the…

Donal McCartney Michael Davitt: After the Land League 1882-1906 by Carla King (UCD Press, €50.00) Michael Davitt’s early career has been well documented, most comprehensively by T.W. Moody in Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846-82. It was Moody’s contention that Davitt, in his role as ‘father of the Land League’, made his most significant contribution to…

A Church of the Poor: Pope Francis and the Transformation of Orthodoxy by Clemens Sedmak (Orbis Books / Alban Books, £23.99) This important book is written with the aim, it seems to this reviewer, of enlarging our sense of what ‘orthodoxy’ ought to mean in the era of Pope Francis. Prof. Sedmak is a distinguished…