Michael Collins will be a familiar figure to readers. For many years he was an important commentator for international television services on events and personalities in Rome. He brings all that experience to bear in this new biography of Pope Leo XIV. This is the second biography of the Pope to come to hand recently,…
Brendan McManus will be known to readers for his writings on the Camino and for the trilogy of books that make up the Mess series of books, dealing with the spiritual state of the world today. These have all been widely read. But here is a very different book. It appeals to stillness and to…
The centenary of Sir David Attenborough has been marked with tributes around the globe, wherever indeed his various full-colour television series on the natural world since 1979 have been shown. These have done a great deal to arouse in many people a passionate interest in the world around us. The tributes were certainly well deserved.…
The Story of Us: Independent Ireland and 1926 Census, Edited by Orlaith McBride and John Gibney (Irish Academic Press, €24.99 / £22.99) This book, prepared to accompany the release of the forms from the Irish Free State Census in 1926, is surely misnamed. What in fact is the communal collective of the title intended to…
Daily Wisdom – Léann an Lae: Irish Proverbs and Sayings for Each Day of the Year, by John Quinn (Red Stripe Press, €14.99 / £17.50) Author John Quinn died on New Years Day at the age of 84. This book was originally published some six years ago by the now defunct Veritas Publication, whose disappearance was a…
The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland, edited by Gladys Daniel and Andrew Holmes (Oxford University Press, £137.50 / €130.00) Readers who are not dismayed by the suggested price of this academic book will find that it provides a wider view of Ireland in contrast to the letter box view provided by the Census of 1926.…
Mount Jerome: Dublin’s Victorian Cemetery, by Maurice Curtis (The Old Dublin Press, €24.95 / £21.99) Cemeteries have a peculiar fascination for my imagination. But they have their perils. I can still recall the great difficulty of navigating between the plots to reach the grave of the poet and economist George Russell (“AE”), when a…
I held the pen and God did the Writing, by John Tado (Cocoon Press, €10.00 / £ 8.99) The author of this little volume of poems, his second, is a Cork man who began late in life writing what he sees as the poems of a “Catholic poet”. Very much a local man, the…
Slavery: America’s long reckoning from the Founding Era to Today, by Scott Spillman (Basic Books / Little Brown, €35.00 /£30.00) This is not a book about slavery. It is, instead, about how Americans have made sense of slavery: how they have researched and written about it; how they have justified and criticised it.” Such is…
No Church is an Island: 175 Years of St John the Evangelist, Sandymount, Dublin, by Alyson Gavin Lysaght & Shabnam Vasisht (€20.00; to purchase contact the church office at sandynount@dublin.anglican.org) This is a book which those who already have Dr Ian Milne’s history of St Bartholomew’s, Clyde Road, will like to have, as it fills out more…
Peter Costello