Best of
Ireland

2000

Kindling the Celtic Spirit: Ancient Traditions to Illumine Your Life Through the Seasons


Mara Freeman - 2000
    Discover myths, rituals, recipes, and crafts for every month of theyear. Honor Saint Brigit with a prayer in February, or ensure a merry start to May with a bowl of frothy syllabub. Come together with friends and neighbors to celebrate community in the high days of August, then learn to weave a solstice wreath in snowy December.Traditional blessings, ancient lore, and guided meditations inspire you to reconnect with the rhythms of the natural world, and view the sacred as an integral part of every day. Rediscover the wisdom and healing power of nature, and cultivate and honor your soul as you would the earth. Let the spirit of the ancient Celts enchant you in every season, year after year.

Making Sense of the Troubles: The Story of the Conflict in Northern Ireland


David McKittrick - 2000
    After a chapter of background on the period from 1921 to 1963, it covers the ensuing period-the descent into violence, the hunger strikes, the Anglo-Irish accord, the bombers in England-to the present shaky peace process. Behind the deluge of information and opinion about the conflict, there is a straightforward and gripping story. Mr. McKittrick and Mr. McVea tell that story clearly, concisely, and, above all, fairly, avoiding intricate detail in favor of narrative pace and accessible prose. They describe and explain a lethal but fascinating time in Northern Ireland's history, which brought not only death, injury, and destruction but enormous political and social change. They close on an optimistic note, convinced that while peace-if it comes-will always be imperfect, a corner has now been decisively turned. The book includes a detailed chronology, statistical tables, and a glossary of terms.

The Miseducation Years


Ross O'Carroll-Kelly - 2000
    The further adventures of Paul Howard's eponymous anti-hero.

Those Are Real Bullets: Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1972


Peter Pringle - 2000
    Five were shot in the back. A major turning point in the recent history of Northern Ireland, the massacre galvanized Catholics in their struggle against the British presence in Ulster. In Those Are Real Bullets, Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson provide the definitive, full-length narrative account of Bloody Sunday. Using extensive interviews and recently declassified documents unavailable for previous books about the shootings, they vividly re-create the chaos and terror of the day and capture the full human impact of the tragedy. Those Are Real Bullets provides an intimate portrait of a city in revolt and the climax of a failed military response that plunged Northern Ireland into three decades of armed conflict. "A shocking, stomach-turning, enraging narrative history that should be required reading." -- Irish Independent "Written by two veteran, first-rate reporters, this book will remain the standard account of that miserable day." -- Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Daily Mail

Scarlet Feather


Maeve Binchy - 2000
    Set in contemporary Ireland, filled with warmth, wit, and drama, Scarlet Feather is the story of Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather, their spouses, families, and friends, and the struggling new catering business that transforms their lives in ways big and small.

To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland


Sean O'Callaghan - 2000
    A vivid account of the Irish slave trade: the previously untold story of over 50,000 Irish men, women and children who were transported to Barbados and Virginia.

The Names Upon the Harp: Irish Myth and Legend


Marie Heaney - 2000
    Tales include The Birth of Cuchulain and Finn and the Salmon of Knowledge. Full-color illustrations.

The Hill Bachelors


William Trevor - 2000
    These beautifully rendered tales reveal Trevor's compassion for the human condition and confirm once again his position as one of the premier writers of the short story.

Exit Unicorns


Cindy Brandner - 2000
    It is the spring of 1968 in Belfast and James Kirkpatrick has just lost his father under suspicious circumstances, Casey Riordan is released from prison after five years and Pamela O'Flaherty has crossed an ocean and a lifetime of memories to find the man she fell in love with as a little girl. All three lives are on a collision course with each other against the backdrop of the burgeoning civil rights movement and a nation on the brink of revolution. They come from disparate backgrounds-Jamie a wealthy aristocrat whose life is like an imperfect but multi-faceted jewel-brilliant, flawed and with a glitter that is designed to distract the observer. Casey, a card-carrying member of the Irish Republican Army, who must face the fact that five years away has left him a stranger, a misfit in his own neighborhood where not everyone is sympathetic to a convicted rebel. Pamela, who has come to Ireland in search of a memory and a man who may not have existed in the first place. Through it all runs the ribbon of a love story: love of country, the beginning love of two people unable to resist the pull of each other regardless of the cost to themselves and those around them, and the selfless love of one man who no longer believes himself capable of such emotion. It is an electrifying tale of a people divided by religion and politics, a tale of love and danger, of triumph and tragedy. Ultimately it is the story of that 'terrible beauty' herself-Ireland-and how nation is bound to one's identity, woven into the weft of all we become.

The Most Beautiful Villages of Ireland


Christopher Fitz-Simon - 2000
    This is a journey full of rural gems, some famous, others less so. Here are the colored coastal villages of Cork, their vibrant houses sloping down to a sea that so many Irish people crossed to found other communities in America. Here too are the stunning medieval churches of Roscommon and Galway; and the villages of Antrim, standing ruggedly in defiance of the northern seas.

Nory Ryan's Song


Patricia Reilly Giff - 2000
    Every year Nory's father goes away on a fishing boat and returns with the rent money for the English lord who owns their cottage and fields, the English lord bent upon forcing the Irish from their land so he can tumble the cottages and clear the fields for grazing. Times are never easy on Maidin Bay, but this year, a terrible blight attacks the potatoes. No crop means starvation. Twelve-year-old Nory must summon the courage and ingenuity to find food, to find hope, to find a way to help her family survive.From the Hardcover edition.

Everything in This Country Must


Colum McCann - 2000
    In the title story, a teenage girl must choose between allegiance to her Catholic father and gratitude to the British soldiers who have saved the family's horse. The young hero of Hunger Strike, a novella, tries to replicate the experience of his uncle, an IRA prisoner on hunger strike. And in Wood, a small boy does his part for the Protestant marches, concealing his involvement from his blind father.

Hungry for Home


Cole Moreton - 2000
    Cole Moreton tells the story of the Blaskets through the eyes of the Kearney family, who lived there for generations until 1947 when they paid a terrible price for their isolation-a young man's life. Moreton discovers a few survivors still alive within sight of the Great Blasket, but most had left Ireland for America, settling in Massachusetts. Hungry for Home is a beautifully written and gripping account of a quest for a vanished people, and the Kearneys' incredible journey into the twentieth century is "a moving, atmospheric testament to the mythic lure of home". Entertainment Weekly.

The Other Side of the Rainbow: The Autobiography of the Voice of Clannad


Maire Brennan - 2000
    Along with sister Enya, and the other members of Clannad, Máire has always fiercely guarded her privacy. Yet in recent years - largely due to a new self confidence and discovery of Christian faith - Máire has begun to share a testimony that has inspired thousands of fans on both sides of the Atlantic. We follow her life - from idyllic innocent childhood in county Donegal, through the highs and lows of "success" in the public eye, the personal torment of successive relationship breakdown, and the consequences of promiscuity and drug and alcohol indulgence. Ultimately this is a story of a woman whose dream became a nightmare, and yet throughout the trauma a still small voice continued to whisper her name. In seeking out that voice she finally found her love and security she had craved all her life.

Sean O'Casey: Critical Guide / Three Dublin Plays: The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, the Plough and the Stars


Christopher Murray - 2000
    This guide introduces, explores and analyzes in detail the principal themes and styles of the work of Sean O'Casey. It also places it in the context of modern theatre, and includes a select bibliography.

Early Irish Farming: A Study Based Mainly on the Law-Texts of the 7th and 8th Centuries AD


Fergus Kelly - 2000
    

Beyond the Mist: What Irish Mythology Can Teach Us About Ourselves


Peter O'Connor - 2000
    Beyond the Mist is an introduction to Irish mythology which also explores its contemporary relevance to the mysteries, unknowns, and vicissitudes of life. It explores the various divine and other figures as symbolic aspects of the individual psyche and the unconscious mind, while providing insights into these repressed aspects of our inner life and suggesting appropriate ways of relating to and integrating these qualities.

Spotlight


Carole Bellacera - 2000
    Wounded in the arm himself, Devin vows revenge on his British opressors - and steps into a cycle of violence that will leave him with a shattered family and an empty heart.Eighteen years later, Devin has become an earnest rock-n-roller who uses his songs to relate the horrors he's seen to an international audience of millions. His American tour photographer, Fonda Blayne, is falling in love with him - but she has no idea that his brooding silences may be rooted in a very real danger. Devin hopes that he's left the violence of his homeland in the past - but some very powerful and deadly forces are hoping to take advantage of his life in the spotlight...

The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: An Anthology of Criticism


Jonathan M. Wooding - 2000
    These tales have long held a fascination for both scholars and general readers, but there is no satisfactory, comprehensive treatment of them in print. This anthology presents a selection of the most important studies of the subject, to which is added a number of new essays representing the current state of scholarship. A general introduction is provided and an extensive bibliography.Containing the most important critical materials for an understanding of the Irish Otherworld Voyage legends, this anthology will be of interest and use to teachers and students of early Irish history and literature, comparative literature and mythology.

Lockout: Dublin 1913


Padraig Yeates - 2000
    Striking conductors and drivers, members of the Irish Transport Workers' Union, abandoned their vehicles. They had refused a demand from their employer, William Martin Murphy of the Dublin United Transport Company, to forswear union membership or face dismissal. The company then locked them out. Within a month, the charismatic union leader, James Larkin, had called out over 20,000 workers across the city in sympathetic action.By January 1914 the union had lost the battle, lacking the resources for a long campaign. But it won the war: 1913 meant that there was no going back to the horrors of pre-Larkin Dublin. This outstanding survey shows why: it has already established itself as the definitive work on the Lockout.

To Ireland, I


Paul Muldoon - 2000
    From Beckett and Bowen, through Joyce, MacNeice, Swift, and Yeats, To Ireland, I is a provocative re-reading of the major Irish authors, with a particular emphasis on the continuity of the tradition.

Consumed in Freedom's Flame: A Novel of Ireland's Struggle for Freedom 1916-1921


Cathal Liam - 2000
    Together with a small group of other republicans, Aran fights for his nation's freedom during the early part of the twentieth century. The story weaves fact and fiction around the exploits of this youthful Irishman and his adventurous friends from Dublin's 1916 Easter Rising to the ensuing Irish war for independence. Theirs is the troubled and tormented account of Ireland's attempt to control its own destiny in the face of resolute British opposition and the intervention of Fate's cruel hand. The book provides both historical background and imaginative detail seen through the eyes of this romantically brave young man as he seeks to free his homeland from the bonds of British entanglement. Patrick Pearse, Michael Collins and other historical figures of the period are described in vivid detail as Aran joins them in the common pursuit of emancipation from the Strangers' colonial grasp.

The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal


Hugh Dorian - 2000
    He survived Ireland’s Great Famine, only to squander uncommon opportunities for self-advancement. Having lost his job and clashed with priests and policemen, he moved to the city of Derry but never slipped the shadow of trouble. Three of his children died from disease and his wife fell drunk into the River Foyle and drowned. Dorian declined into alcohol-numbed poverty and died in an overcrowded slum in 1914. A unique document survived the tragedy of Dorian’s life. In 1890 he completed a "true historical narrative" of the social and cultural transformation of his home community. This narrative forms the most extensive lower-class account of the Great Famine. A moving account of the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, it invites comparison with the classic slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Dorian achieves a degree of totality in his reconstruction of the world of the pre-Famine poor that is unparalleled in contemporary memoir or fiction. He describes their working and living conditions, sports and drinking, religious devotions and festivals. A sense of loss, closer to bereavement than nostalgia, is threaded through the text: it is a lament for the might have been — the future as imagined before the Famine — rather than the actual past. Dorian’s narrative was never published in his own lifetime and all but forgotten after the author’s death. First published in Ireland in August 2000, The Outer Edge of Ulster includes a scholarly introduction that traces the troubles that beset the author and locates the narrative in wider literary contexts. Appearing for the first time in America, this critically acclaimed book offers an intimate look at the everyday lives of ordinary people facing extraordinary challenges.

Kevin Myers: From the Irish Times Column 'an Irishman's Diary'


Kevin Myers - 2000
    'Did you see Myers today?' Often we meant to and didn't. Often we did and hoped, in vain, that we'd be able to recall it later. Outspoken, whimsical, outrageous, sheerly funny, deadly serious - you never knew what to expect. Sometimes Myers is our jester, sometimes our conscience, some times red rag to our bull. This book collects and selects from a decade of the 'Diary' to provide, at last, an intriguing taste of Myers.

The IRA 1968-2000: Analysis of a secret army


J. Bowyer Bell - 2000
    Based on thousands of interviews over 35 years with the leaders and members of the Republican movement and the IRA itself, as well as the Irish, British and Americans involved in the Troubles, the focus of this study is on the workings of an organization involved in armed struggle.

Music and the Celtic Otherworld: From Ireland to Iona


Karen Ralls-MacLeod - 2000
    From the descriptions of the supernatural power of the "fairy" harp in Elfland in the Scottish ballads to the sacred music of God's Heaven in the Christian Saints' Lives, the Celtic sources provide a rich and varied selection of references to music and its perceived supernatural power and influence.

Personal Accounts From Northern Ireland's Troubles: Public Conflict, Private Loss


Marie Smyth - 2000
    Fresh look at Kurdistan Iraq today, including the role of central government and international forces, and the region's political and economic future.

The Irish Counter Revolution, 1921 1936: Treatyite Politics And Settlement In Independent Ireland


John M. Regan - 2000
    In 1926, his successor Kevin O'Higgins went to London with a proposal to have the British monarch crowned king of a reunited Ireland. In 1933, General Eoin O'Duffy, leader of the Blueshirts, advocated a corporatist state on the Fascist Italian model, within a republican settlement. John Regan explains how such contrasting political views were reconciled within an evolving treatyite position. He argues that there existed elements of anti-democratic culture on both sides of the treaty divide, not least Collins himself. Based on ten year's research in archives in Ireland, Britain, France, and the USA, this is a radical reappraisal of the Irish Free State.

My Life on the Road: An Autobiography


Nan Joyce - 2000
    

Irish Folklore


Brid Mahon - 2000
    Here, in a succinct style, Brid Mahon gives an account of the roots of what comes down to Irish people as tradition, and what they in turn pass on to their children. With the advent of mass communication and easy transport in the later decades of the 20th century, much of what we call folklore began to die away, and is preserved only in the archives of the great folklore collections in University College Dublin. Brid Mahon draws on that treasure trove in her account of the ancient sagas, of the great traditions of storytelling, of the attitudes of the Irish to the spirit world, in the form of fairies, leprechauns and banshees, and of the customs relating to hospitality and generosity.

Father & I: A Memoir


Carlo Gébler - 2000
    Ernest Gébler was a writer whose novel The Plymouth Adventure was made into a film starring Spencer Tracy. But when Carlo Gébler's mother—Edna O'Brien—eclipsed her husband's literary success, Ernest Gébler convinced himself that he was the writer of her books, a strain which broke the family up. After years of silence, Carlo finally discovered both the truth about his father and feelings which he had not known himself capable of. "You cannot change the past, but with understanding you can sometimes draw the poison out of it."Born in Dublin in 1954, Carlo Gébler has written nine books, dramatisations for theatre, and radio.

Dublin Tenement Life


Kevin C. Kearns - 2000
    Kearns presents a fascinating, often heartbreaking look at life in the slums of Dublin from the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Gathering original and authentic oral testimonies from survivors of the old Dublin tenements and presenting along with the social and historical background, as well as a valuable collection of photographs, Kearns shows what life was like in Europe's most wretched slums. Their accounts are sometimes tragic, but always moving. Equally, they are an inspiring chronicle of struggle, survival, and the triumph of the human spirit.For readers of books such as A Star Called Henry or Angela's Ashes, for fans of Studs Terkel -- or for anyone fascinated by modern Irish history -- Dublin Tenement Life will fill a gap in our knowledge about Irish urban life.

In the Country of the Young


Lisa Carey - 2000
    Many were saved, but some were not -- including a young girl who died crying out the name of her brother.In the present day, the artist Oisin MacDara lives in self-imposed exile on Tiranogue -- the small island where the shipwrecked Irish settled. The past is Oisin's curse, as memories of the twin sister who died tragically when he was a boy haunt him still.Then on a quiet All Hallows' Eve, a restless spirit is beckoned into his home by a candle flickering in the window: the ghost of the girl whose brief life ended on Tiranogue's shore more than a century earlier. In Oisin's house she seeks comfort and warmth, and a chance at the life that was denied her so long ago.For a lonely man chained by painful memories, nothing will ever be the same again.

Discovering Kerry: Its History, Heritage and Topography


T.J. Barrington - 2000
    Originally published in 1976, this is a work of scholarship and observation setting out the history and heritage of a most beautiful Irish county and how one gets to see what should be seen.

National Geographic Traveler: Ireland


Christopher Somerville - 2000
    From the cosmopolitan streets of Dublin to the horse-racing stables of County Kildare, from the fabled Ring of Kerry to the Yeats Country surrounding Sligo Town, from a walking tour of Dingle Way to a self-guided drive through the Sperrin Hills of Northern Ireland, from mountain moorlands to eerie bogs, this new edition guides you to memorable attractions throughout Ireland's many storied regions.

A Wee Bit of Irish Wisdom


Jim Gallery - 2000
    A treasury of wit and wisdom from the Emerald Isle.

Early Irish Kingship and Succession


Bart Jaski - 2000
    Among them are sacral kingship, seniority, qualification for succession, and the heir appa

The Irish Highwaymen


Stephen Dunford - 2000
    The lives and times of fifteen of Ireland's most notorious adventurers are told here: audacious ambushes, sword and gun-battles with landlords and military, daring escapes, hideouts and disguised identities, plots, betrayals and raids - and sometimes brutal ends by hanging, beheading, or gunfire.

Liam O'Flaherty: the Collected Stories, Volume 3


A.A. Kelly - 2000
    These 182 stories include all those included in previous anthologies; the Irish language stories; stories which have never before been collected inn book form; and original stories published here for the first time. This luxurious set will be a treasure for all those who know and love the work of one of Ireland's most skilled and passionate writers.

The Irish Crafts: Customs For Samhain/Halloween


Conrad Bladey - 2000
    Only traditional well researched crafts, stories, recipes and celebration instructions are included. A good guide for children and families wishing to celebrate in the traditional Irish way.

The Sheela-na-Gigs of Ireland and Britain: The Divine Hag of the Christian Celts - An Illustrated Guide


Joanne McMahon - 2000
    Its catalogue section is a very comprehensive alphabetical listed reference to all known sheela-na-gigs in Ireland and Britain. Each entry includes a description, details of the location, and a drawing.