On the Summits of the Highest Love by Enzo Farinella (Edizioni Grafiser, €15.00) Through Mountains and Valleys by Enzo Farinella (Edizioni Grafiser, €15.00) Joe Carroll The author is a former cultural attaché at the Italian embassy in Dublin, who has settled in Ireland as a journalist and RAI correspondent, and has made it his mission in life to…
Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks (Atlantic, £18.99) Peter Hegarty Brooks’ theme is “the demise of sound accounting”. Slipshod work by the ‘Big Four’ companies that dominate the profession – PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, and KPMG – have brought it into disrepute. The author, an investigative journalist…
The Secret of Marrowbone (15A) There’s a scene in this where a girl puts her hand into a hole in the ceiling with a morsel of food to feed a skunk that’s living in her attic. When she does so, a human hand fondles her. I don’t know about you, but if that happened to me I’d be…
With the papal visit imminent we can expect some related documentaries, and on Tuesday of last week RTÉ1 was first in line. Rebel Pope was a docudrama from National Geographic, and while it was worth watching I wasn’t that impressed. The most interesting aspects dealt with revolutionary times in Argentina when Jorge Bergoglio, later Pope…
It’s unlikely that there’s a more conspicuous or remarkable example of Catholic art in the modern world than Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona, described by Pope Benedict in 2010 as standing “as a visible sign of the invisible God, to whose glory these spires rise like arrows pointing towards absolute light and to…
Life in the Church of Ireland 1600-1800 by Robert Wyse Jackson (Ballinakella Press, €17.50) Robert Marshall Published initially in 1941 under the title Scenes from Irish Clerical Life in the 17th and 18th Centuries, this book was written by a clergyman of the Church of Ireland who had read law at Trinity College Dublin and been called…
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier (Bodley Head, £9.99) Peter Hegarty Author Lanier is a disenchanted idealist, a digital pioneer who once believed that technology would improve our lives. He now associates social media with “nastiness”. People come together in a setting “in which the main – or often the…
Smile of Joy: Mary of Nazareth by Thomas Casey SJ (Messenger Publications, €7.95) Fr Casey is currently Dean of Philosophy at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. But this book is a very personal and very human one. Using some of the familiar incidents in the Gospels that feature Mary of Nazareth he hopes he says to ‘reintroduce’…
Pat O’Kelly The National Concert Hall ended its 2017/18 International Concert Season recently with the first visit to Ireland of the Würth Philharmonic Orchestra. Initially I mistakenly thought Würth to be a place but closer scrutiny revealed it to be the name of an individual – the businessman, philanthropist and art collector, Reinhold Würth.…
The World of Books by the Books Editor Back in 2013, the Bishop of Northampton Dr Peter Doyle appointed Canon John Udris to inquire into the suitability of Gilbert Keith Chesterton for canonisation. Canon Udris’s report will be given to the bishop later this month. He has been quoted in the press as saying…
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan
Greg Daly
Peter Costello