At Christmas it is nice to give people a book which they will enjoy on other occasions, a book that will provide not just interest and amusement, but also insights of lasting value. Here is a small selection of books currently in the shops which we think readers may want to give or would love…
At this time of the year the book shops are flooded with books for children and young adults, all hoping for great sales over the few weeks of the year when people go on a splurge of holiday related book buying. But like a puppy, a good book isn’t just for Christmas. On these pages…
Stand Up and Fight: When Munster Beat the All Blacks by Alan English (Yellow Jersey Press, €14.00 / £9.99) Presently the Irish team is enjoying first place in the pecking-order of world rugby. This has not resulted from a meteoric rise from rags to riches. For decades rugby has been played in Ireland to a high…
Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour (Polity Press, £12.99 pb) Frank Litton It was not so long ago that the path of history was clear. It was a story of progress towards more liberal, secular, democracies. Europe and the US where the modern world had been invented and from where it…
Codebreaker: The untold story of Richard Hayes, the Dublin librarian who helped turn the tide of World War II by Marc McMenamin (Gill Books, €16.99) Felix M. Larkin “Ghosts hover / Lyster, Hayes, Henchy, / And those who served them”: thus in 2007 did Gerard Lyne, formerly Keeper of Manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland, recall in…
Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democracy by Ian Hughes (Zero Books / John Hunt Publishing, €14.50) Peter Hegarty Do we have a right to know something about the mental health of prominent people? Ian Hughes, a research fellow at UCC’s Environmental Research Institute, suggests that we do: if, as psychiatrists believe, one in twenty people…
Awakening Inner Peace: A Little Books of Hours by Sister Stan (Columba Books, €12.99 / £10.99) This little book, harking back to the pre-Reformation books of hours, though it lacks illustrations, might be called ‘the very rich hours’ of Sr Stanislaus. Certainly her intention, like those ancient books, is to enrich the daily prayer life of…
Nano Nagle: The life and the Legacy by Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney, and Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck (Irish Academic Press, €24.95) In 2013 Pope Francis declared Nano Nagle (1718–84), the founder of the Presentation Order, to be venerable. For the nuns of that order, their friends and associates and the countless admirers of Nano Nagle’s work this was…
Sharing the Wisdom of Time, Pope Francis and friends (Messenger Publications, €24.95 / £27.50) This is a book inspired directly by Pope Francis. Youth, as we are all aware, knows it all, middle age has had ‘experience’, but maturity (surely to God a better term than ‘old age’), maturity has wisdom. Though it contains reflections…
Lonely Mystic: A new portrait of Henri J.M. Nouwen by Michael Ford (Paulist Press, $16.95 / £12.99) Anthony Redmond What is the reason for the enduring appeal of Henri Nouwen? This Dutch Catholic priest and celebrated spiritual writer died in 1996 at the age of 64. His appeal, for me, is his vulnerability, openness, sensitivity and…
Peter Costello