Peter CostelloA Short History of the Church of Ireland by Kenneth Milne (Messenger Publications, €12.95/£11.50) Dr Milne is well known to all those working in the areas of Church history in Ireland. This book at hand is the fifth edition of a book which has already served its purpose well by providing a little manual with…
Category: Books
The changing natal mores of the Irish nation over the centuries
Birth and the Irish: a miscellany edited by Salvador Ryan (Worldwell,€25.00/£22.00) Salvador Ryan is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. This new book completes a trilogy begun with Death and the Irish, (published in 2016 by Wordwell Books). The sequel, Marriage and the Irish, appeared in summer 2019. And now we are given…
Lincoln’s assassin and his exceptional family
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail, £14.99) Booth, by the American author Karen Joy Fowler, is a novel about the family of actor Junius Brutus Booth. The most famous – or infamous – of his children was John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Booth père (1796-1852) was an Englishman who abandoned a wife and…
Hopes for a new Spring for the Church in Ireland
Fr Niall Coll The Synodal Pathway: When Rhetoric Meets Reality, edited by Eamon Conway, Eugene Duffy and Mary McDaid (Columba Books, €16.99/£14.99) St John Henry Newman famously observed that “there has seldom been a Council without great confusion after it”. The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was no exception. Hence the often fractious discourse between traditionalists and…
Though our bodies may fail, love, faith and courage never do
Climb with Charlie, by Charlie Bird (Merrion Press, €17.99/£16.99) In 2021, veteran RTÉ journalist Charlie Bird made it known that he has motor neurone disease. He was charged up to make a positive response. He decided to organise a charity climb of Ireland’s famous Holy Mountain, Croagh Patrick. In its fulfilment, his simple plan grew…
Hopkins Summer School
34th International Hopkins Festival July 22-28 2022 Newbridge College Theatre, Newbridge, Co. Kildare The Gerard Manley Hopkins International Summer School, which has been called “a bright gem in the literary world”, by Patrick Samway SJ, the American literary scholar and teacher, begins tomorrow (Friday July 22), and closes next week on 28. The details of all…
The World of Books
Discover God Daily: Seven Life-Changing moments from the Journey of Saint Ignatius, by Brendan McManus SJ and Jim Deeds (Messenger Publications, €9.95/£8.95) Pedro Arrupe: a heart larger than the World, by Brian Grogan SJ (Messenger Publications, €16.95/£18.95) Anyone who wishes to understand the feelings and thoughts that inform and motivate Pope Francis’s approach to the…
The saint in a battered hat
Anthony Gaughan A Poet in the House: Patrick Kavanagh at Priory Grove, by Elizabeth O’Toole (Lilliput Press, €15.00/£13.00) Elizabeth O’Toole’s memoir is a fascinating snapshot of Patrick Kavanagh in his later years, in very different circumstances than people often imagined him in. Kavanagh was born near Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan, on October 23 1904. After attending the…
An Irish culture flamed upon the night
Left without a handkerchief, by Robert O’Byrne (Lilliput Press, €18.00/£16.00) The title of this erudite, elegant and elegiac book from ‘The Irish Aesthete’ blog writer Robert O’Byrne captures the essential “grand tragedy” that befell the Irish gentry in their “twilight”, to quote Mark Bence-Jones. Here O’Byrne takes advantage of a tight focus and a circumscribed…
Journalism can be a dangerous calling
Line of Fire: Journeys Through A Media Minefield, by David O’Donoghue (Orpen Press, €17.00/£15.00) The “media minefield” that the author negotiates had its dangers like being thrown on the breadline at short notice but mainly it is a humorous telling of a blooding on provincial newspapers, a stint in RTÉ and then into the world…