The Harbour Within: A Book of Simple Spirituality by Sister Consilio (Hachette Books Ireland, €14.99 hb / €8.99pb) While working as a young nun in Athy Sr Consilio came in contact, through the local hospital, with “the men of the road”. These were men, often from a farming background, some ex-soldiers, who had been rendered…
Migraine: Not Just Another Headache ed. by Dr Marie Murray, compiled by Patrick Little & Audrey Craven (Currach Press, €12.99) In my time I have suffered from migraines. They are a very unlovely thing indeed, debilitating a person for days, or even weeks, on end. Recurrent and painful though they are, they are not fatal.…
Gregory O’Connor Rebellion and Revolution in Dublin: Voices from a Suburb, Rathfarnham, 1913-23 (South Dublin County Council, €15; available also from any South Dublin Library, or online from www.southdublinlibraries.ie/bookstore) This book consists of 13 essays by different authors on various aspects of the momentous events which occurred in the 10 years between the founding of…
Fences (12A) ‘Good fences make good neighbours’, wrote Robert Frost. The present – heavily symbolic – film re-writes that epithet to read, ‘some people build fences to keep people out and other people build them to keep people in’. Based on August Wilson’s Pulitzer pize-winning play of the same name, it deals with the efforts…
The World of Books The old adage tells us we are what we eat. Whatever about that, it is certainly true that, intellectually at least, we are what we read. This being the case, I was not unnaturally curious about how books might have shaped the mind and imagination of the new president of the…
A couple of new shows hit the TV screens last week. With much advance hype one of these arrived on RTÉ2 last Thursday night. US drama This Is Us tells the interacting stories of several individuals who share the same birthday. It was appealing enough to make me want to watch another episode, but only…
Séan Ryan The Silent Books: A Deaf Family and the Disappearing Australian-Irish Sign Language by Bernadette T. Wallis (Missionary Sisters of Service; available on Amazon.co.uk at £17.86 / Aus$30.00; www.missionarysisters.org.au) Ahearing child of parents who were both profoundly deaf, Sr Wallis has written an insightful history of her parents’ childhood, education and family life, and…
A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics: A Neuroscientist on How to Make Sense of a Complex World by Daniel Levitin (Viking. £12.99 / €17) Exposure to misinformation is part of the human condition. Some – Levitin calls them ‘lying weasels’ – will bend the truth in order to persuade us to buy something or…
Markievicz: A Most Outrageous Rebel by Lindie Naughton (Merrion Press, €19.99 pb / €65hb ) This is a comprehensive account of the many lives of Constance Gore-Booth also known as Countess Markievicz, the defiant aristocratic hero of the poor of Dublin. She was born in London on February 4, 1868. Her father Sir Henry Gore-Booth…
Hacksaw Ridge (16) There are so many Christological echoes in this blistering World War II tale, by the end you expect messianic doctor Desmond Dos (Andrew Garfield) to say something like, “I am who I am” as he’s being stretchered off the battlefield. A pacifist from the outset, he enlists in the army on an…
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan