The Greatest Secret: How Being God’s Adopted Children Changes Everything by Krish Kandiah (Hodder and Stoughton, £12.99) I showed this book to a regular reader of religious books while writing this notice. She grasped the general tenor of its theme at once. “Oh,” she said, “what a lovely idea.” It seemed to her to get to…
The Benedictine Nuns & Kylemore Abbey: A History by Deirdre Raftery and Catherine KilBride (The Benedictine Nuns Kylemore Abbey Centenary/Irish Academic Press, €19.95/£17.99) This book is the story of an Irish success, but it is much more than that. It also encapsulates, in the story of Kylemore Abbey, a history of Connemara over some two centuries,…
Ballina Remembered by Aubrey Malone (Lapwing Publications, Belfast, €9.99; ISBN 978-1-9163457-1-3; copies can be ordered direct from the publisher marymannion@hotmail.com) Noel Monahan Here we have a collection of memory poems to take you back in time to Ballina, Co. Mayo. It’s about memory and images from the past, a view from the inside with the…
Shadow Warriors: The Irish Army Ranger Wing by Paul O’Brien and Wayne Fitzgerald Mercier Press (€12.99/£11.99) Joe Carroll Back in the 1980s, there used to be an advertisement on RTÉ showing a squad of soldiers in battledress, holding rifles jogging along a road while singing lustily: “We are Rangers, mighty, mighty Rangers.” And then the Rangers…
Irish Jesuits in Penal Times: Thomas Betagh and his Companions by Thomas J. Morrissey SJ (Messenger Publications, €19.95) In what is now called St Kevin’s Park in Dublin’s Camden Row, just off Camden Street, which was once a graveyard dating from medieval times, there stands a monument. It is to the Jesuit Fr John Austin, who…
Without a Dog’s Chance: The Nationalists of Northern Ireland and the Irish Boundary Commission 1920–1922 by James A. Cousins (Irish Academic Press 2020) In July 1925, nearly a full century ago, the Irish Boundary Commission sat for the last time, bringing to an end a sorry business that began badly and ended in confusion. It may…
The World of Books By the books editor In recent months people have been forced for reasons of social solidarity to work from home, rather than make what was for many a two-hour drive to work and another two hours home. But this working from home, feared at first, has worked out well. Working from…
Jesus Through Muslim Eyes by Richard Shumack (SPCK, £12.99) The other day, before I started on Jesus Through Muslim Eyes, I read in a 1957 book of travels through North Africa from Tunis to Cairo that in Beja, a remote village near the Libyan-Tunisian border, the mosque was dedicated to Jesus Christ. It surprised the author…
The Museum Building of Trinity College: A Model of Victorian Craftsmanship by Christine Casey and Patrick Wyse Jackson (Four Courts Press, €45) Christopher Moriarty Now is a fitting time to browse an extraordinary book about an extraordinary building. Created in 1857, the Museum Building of Trinity College, Dublin has been a familiar object to generations of…
Really Rotten Rhymes poems by Gabriel Fitzmaurice, illustrations by Alice Coleman (Mercier Press, €14.99/£13.99) This is a book filled with the rude vitality of childhood, with equal measures of both qualities. It makes a wonderful read for those who have children still around them, or can remember anything at all of their own early years. This…
Peter Costello