Take a Priest Like You: A Long Journey Home, by Michael Barrington (MJB Imprints, £15. 82 through Amazon) Today author Michael Barrington lives with his French wife in a small town in California up in the hills east of San Francisco. This is quite a contrast to the Britain he was born and bred in,…
The Irish Annals, by Daniel P. Mc Carthy (Four Courts Press, €35.00 / £31.50) This is a new paperback edition at a cheaper price of a volume that will be, for many engaged in the task of deciphering what we think we know about early Christian and medieval Ireland, an essential vade mecum. The author…
A Place Where Ireland is Invisible, by James Harpur, woodcuts by Paul Ó Colmáin (The Eblana Press, €35.00 postage included, Ireland / €45.00 post included, worldwide) The allusion in the title is to the banishment of Columcille to Scotland: he had to go to a place from which the coast of his beloved Ireland could…
From Bullets to Ballots: Politics and Electioneering in Post-Civil War Kerry, 1923-33, by Owen O’Shea (University College Dublin Press, €30.00 / £24.99) This is an account of how Kerry people emerged from the horrors of the Civil War, or as the author pithily puts it – how they settled their political differences by ballots…
Pre-Famine fever epidemics: A case study of the Cork Street Fever Hospital, Dublin, by Ciarán McCabe (Maynooth Studies in Local History / Four Courts Press, €12.95 / £10.99) Molly Malone is a much-disputed Dublin character. Though she may well have been a songwriter’s invention, her death from a “fever” was one which certainly carried…
Leo XIV: An Augustinian Life in Context, by Brian Heffernan (Messenger Publications, €12.95 / £10.95) This book is the second short biography of the new Pope to arrive in the last three months. Others are doubtless on the way. And we can be sure that those 500-page volumes so typical of American journalism today…
Jonah and Me, by John F. Deane (Carcanet Press, £12.99 / €16.99) John F. Deane is a poet who continues to bewilder us with the sheer skill of his late creativity. Like W.B. Yeats, and another more famous Person, he has kept the best wines until the late hour. This new collection comes with…
From Crown to Harp: How the Anglo-Irish Treaty was Undone, 1921 – 1949, by David McCullagh (Gill Books, €26.99 / £25.99) This is an account of the three decades in Ireland which followed the War of Independence. Those years featured a number of remarkable Irish persons. Not least among them was Alfred O’Rahilly, an…
Broken But Holy: Becoming Human, by John O’Brien OFM (St Pauls Publishing, €10.00; contact stpauls.ie) The writings of John O’Brien, formerly of the Franciscan monastery in Athlone, and now at Multyfarnam, were recognised by the late Pope Francis in a personal letter of appreciation for his earlier book Winter Past: The Spirit of Hope. In…
Bloody Summer: A New History of the 1798 Rebellion, by James Quinn (UCD Press, €30.00 / £25.00) Though the events of 1798, variously a “rebellion” for some, but for others a proto-revolution, have never been forgotten, their meaning at the time and their present-day significance today are still debated, often with heated exchanges. The events…
Peter Costello