Our Books Editor Peter Costello makes recommendations for you to place in someone’s Christmas stocking… Hey Grandude by Paul McCartney (Puffin Books, £12.99) This is a fun book which granddads of a certain age will enjoy reading with the grandchildren. It is odd to think of Paul McCartney himself as a grandfather – how times…
The Last Right (15A) A Clonakilty man living in Boston transports the body of a man he only met for a few minutes to his final resting place in Rathlin Island with the police on his tail for corpse-snatching. It’s the kind of situation most of us find ourselves in sooner or later, right? Writer/director…
Wild Stories from the Irish Uplands by John G. O’Dwyer (Currach Books, €14.99) The author is a veteran hiker with over thirty years experience of leading walking and mountaineering groups through the Irish countryside. In this collection of essays he visits a number of well-known uplands across the country and recalls their association with historical…
Shooting and Cutting: A survivors guide to film-making and other diseases by Stephen Bradley (Mercier Press, €14.99) Film maker Stephen Bradley is the creator of Noble, the 2014 drama about the true life story of Christina Noble, the children’s rights campaigner and charity worker in Vietnam, who founded the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation. Some years ago Bradley was…
Under Construction: Working with the Architect by Neil O’Boyle (SPCK, £8.99) The literary conceit behind this book is an original one. Author O’Boyle takes the idea of revamping your home, from the garden and front hall up to the bedroom, and gives it a spiritual twist. Most of us will have worked with either a…
Rome: A Pilgrim Guide by Michael Rear, illustrated by Hilary Griffiths (Gracewing, £14.99) Quite by chance the day before this book arrived on my desk I had been looking into the generally excellent Michelin Green Guide series Guide to Rome. This covers a great deal of ground, but for what I was looking for it was…
A fortnight ago I wrote about some of our young musicians and their competition successes. This week I am mentioning another group who are further advanced in their respective careers. An opportunity of hearing five of them arose at the NCH’s recent Friends’ Gala with Camerata Ireland under its founder/director Barry Douglas. The orchestra is…
Last week I heard and saw quite a few interesting items, most of which can be listened back to on the various web players. I relied on EWTN News Nightly for keeping in touch with the visit of Pope Francis to Japan and Thailand. On Monday of last week they reported his inspirational words at…
The Globalist: Peter Sutherland – his Life and Legacy by John Walsh (HarperCollins, £20.00) Garrett Sheehan This review comes with a caveat: the writer was a classmate and friend of the late Peter Sutherland. That said this is a carefully researched, well organized and superbly written first biography in which the author John Walsh…
The Salamanca Diaries: Father McCabe and the Spanish Civil War by Tim Fanning (Merrion Press, €19.95) Joe Carroll For over 300 years, Irish priests who trained in Salamanca brought back traces of Spanish culture to parishes the length and breadth of Ireland. There are references in Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn to the parish priest…
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan