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…
Church, Parish & Education: Interaction Joseph McCann CM (Kingdom Books, €30.00) Joseph McCann was born at Hollis, Queens, New York in 1940. He attended the local Pascal Baylon elementary school taught by the Sisters of St Joseph of Brentwood. After the family re-settled in Dublin he was a student at the secondary school of…
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…
Dalkey: an Illustrated History, by John Martin (Wordwell / Eastwood Books, €20.00 / £17.50) This is not merely a good book; it really is a most excellent one. John Martin is well-qualified to write this topographical tour-de-force, being a long-time Dalkey resident, a former town planner, latterly serving in the Department of the Environment. …
Irish history is at times more influenced by places than by persons. Ask many Irish people of an older or rural background where they are from and they will answer (much like the famous Tailor of Garrynapeaka) with a mention, not of the parish they were born in, but the actual townland, the smallest property…
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…
The Anchorage Bernard O’Donoghue Faber and Faber, £12.99 / €16.99 One of the few photographs of Bernard O’Donoghue before he left Cork for England, in an era when only returned Yanks had cameras, was taken in 1960 at the ordination of Daniel O’ Leary, my first cousin (later to become a celebrated author and theologian). …
Peter Costello