A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics: A Neuroscientist on How to Make Sense of a Complex World by Daniel Levitin (Viking. £12.99 / €17) Exposure to misinformation is part of the human condition. Some – Levitin calls them ‘lying weasels’ – will bend the truth in order to persuade us to buy something or…

Markievicz: A Most Outrageous Rebel by Lindie Naughton (Merrion Press, €19.99 pb / €65hb ) This is a comprehensive account of the many lives of Constance Gore-Booth also known as Countess Markievicz, the defiant aristocratic hero of the poor of Dublin. She was born in London on February 4, 1868. Her father Sir Henry Gore-Booth…

Welcome to the world of alternative truth The row that erupted after President Trump’s inauguration between Team Trump and the media about the attendance at the inauguration has thrown up some interesting attitudes to what some of us I suppose are old fashioned enough to call ‘truth’. Pilate may have turned away with the philosophical…

Peter
Hegarty Greenpeace Captain by Peter Willcox with Ronald B.Weiss (Sandstone Press,  £9.99) In his memoir, seafarer Peter Willcox drolly recalls the 30 years he has devoted to creating ‘chaos and spectacle’ to heighten awareness of destruction of the environment. Activism is dangerous. He was on board the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in July 1985…

Tired of all the Bad News by Fr Bryan Shortall (Columba, €12.99) This might be just the book for The Donald when he feels particularly hard done by. But Fr Bryan, a Capuchin, while accepting that we seem to live in a period suffused by negativity, not just in the news but in life, has…

The Bible in One Year, New International Version read by David Suchet CBE (Hodder and Stoughton, £29.99; also available as a digital download) David Suchet is one of the popular and talented actors of his time, famous for in incarnation of Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Poirot (whose ‘little grey cells’ were informed by the conscience…

Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Malcolm Guite (Hodder and Stoughton, £25.00) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are two poems known in some way to anyone anywhere who reads English.  Yet there was more to Samuel Taylor Coleridge than these and a handful of other poems. He was also …

Andrew Carpenter Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel by John Stubbs (Viking, £25) It is hard to know what to expect from a new biography of Swift so soon after Leo Damrosch’s massive Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (Yale University Press, £10.99pb) in 2013, especially if the latest book  is clearly designed for the…

The Editor Regrets… by James Good  (Lettertec; copies from the author, Parkview, Church Street, Douglas, Cork) Ah yes, what novice contributor to the press has not received one of those rejection slips that give Fr James Good of Cork the title of his collection of essays, largely unpublished? As his own publisher, Fr Good can…

Friend of the Poor. Mary Aikenhead: Woman of Vision, Commitment and Inspiration by Rosaleen Crossan (Columba Press, €12.99) Pope Francis declared Mary Aikenhead to be Venerable on March 18, 2015. This is the first step towards canonisation. It was a much deserved accolade. Mary was born in Cork on January 19, 1787. Her father, David…