Come Drink at the Fount: Introducing the Carmelite Authors by Edmond Cullinan TOC (Veritas, €12.99/£11.99) Edmond Cullinan, a native of Dungarvan, and a priest of the Diocese of Waterford and Lismore, is currently vice-rector of the Pontifical Irish College, Rome. He is a member of the Third Order of Carmel and is also involved in…
Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of media neutrality on controversial issues. There’s few more controversial issues than school shootings in the USA and sadly we had another such last week. The massacre at the primary school in Uvalde, Texas, dominated media news and current affairs in the last week. First there…
The World of Books The picture which illustrates this article represents an old story-teller and his young listener as engraved as a tail-piece by artist Thomas Bewick, and comes from Ritson’s Robin Hood (1795), a celebrated collection of the medieval materials about that notorious British bandit. It is a charming scene, which I like to…
With President Higgins on hand at the NCH to present the awards and the accompanying NSO under Gerhard Markson, the 12th triennial Dublin International Piano Competition finals had four outstanding young musicians – two Japanese, one Czechian and one Russian – vying for the €15,000 first prize along with a series of engagements across the…
Ireland’s Great Famine, Britain’s Great Failure William H. A. Williams (Anthem Press, £80.00/€94.00) It is impossible to write about certain matters, even in a scholarly context, without feelings of outrage. The Irish Famine of 1845-49, the subject of this new book by William H. A. Williams, an American historian who taught at University College Dublin…
The Joseph Tree by Isabel Chenot (Wiseblood Books, US $14.00; the publishers can be addressed at P.O. Box 870 Menomonee Falls, WI 53052, USA, or emailed at wisebloodbooks@gmail.com) Isabel Chenot writes beautifully about the transcendent power of nature in this poetry collection. It’s dedicated to a friend who lost her baby son. The poem documenting this is…
A Breath of Fresh Éire by Olga Balaeva (Beehive, €14.99/£12.99) Author and photographer Olga Balaeva is a new kind of Irish writer, representative of the emerging culture of a future island. Born in Moscow she is alive in several languages including Gaelic. She has already Ireland as gaeilge “a user friendly guide to the language”…
You won’t see a better action film all year than this aerial drama. It’s an unashamed ode to machismo and is dripping with characters from innumerable other like-minded vehicles but in the end it wins you over with its charm. I normally have problems with Tom Cruise in films like this. I’ve never bought into…
Dramas based on true stories can be fascinating, but mixing fiction and history can produce odd results. So it is with The Terror: Infamy (BBC Two, Fridays). The first series is still on repeat on RTÉ Two, Sunday nights, and is an absorbing but very grim story on the ill-fated expedition of Sir John Franklin…
Peace Apart: Lasting Impressions of C.S. Lewis by Bishop Fintan Monahan (Veritas, €9.99/£8.99) This little book is the third in a series in which Fintan Monahan, the bishop of Killaloe, is evoking writers who have been important to him, and whom he wishes to encourage others to take up and read. The previous two books…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone