When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain a mystery. Award-winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox's riveting real-life intellectual detective story travels from the Bronze Age Aegean--the era of Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Helen--to the turn of the 20th century and the work of charismatic English archeologist Arthur Evans, to the colorful personal stories of the decipherers. These include Michael Ventris, the brilliant amateur who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of the decipherment; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.

    I've never seen anything close to his work…”—Eddie Yuen, co-editor of Confronting Capitalism“From Belfast to the Bronx and Chiapas to Kurdistan, Ramor Ryan has shown a lifelong commitment to social justice, a questioning mind and an ability to incorporate historical currents into his work.”—Mick McCaughan, Latin American Correspondent to the Irish TimesAn epic debut, Ramor Ryan’s nonfiction tales read like Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries crossed with Hunter S. Thompson’s wit and flair for the impossible. A shrewd political thinker and philosopher with a knack for ingratiating himself into the thick of any social situation, Ryan has been there and lived to tell about it.As much an adventure story as an unofficial chronicle of modern global resistance movements, Clandestines spirits the reader across the globe, carefully weaving the narrative through illicit encounters and public bacchanals. From the teeming squats of mid-90’s East Berlin, to intrigue in the Zapatista Autonomous Zone, a Croatian Rainbow Gathering on the heels of the G8 protests in Genoa, mutiny on the high seas, the quixotic ambitions of a Kurdish guerilla camp, the contradictions of Cuba, and the neo-liberal nightmare of post-war(s) Central America we see everywhere a world in flux, struggling to be reborn.Ramor Ryan is a rebellious rover and Irish exile who makes his home between New York City and Chiapas.

    This volume captures all the varied legacies of the Emerald Isle, from the earliest prehistoric communities and the first Christian settlements, through centuries of turbulent change and creativity, right up to the present day.Written by a team of scholars--all of whom are native to Ireland--this book offers the most authoritative account of Irish history yet published for the general reader.Emphasizing the paradoxes and ambiguities of Irish history, this book presents a more realistic picture than other histories. It explores, for example, the reasons behind the intense regional variations in agriculture, prosperity, and political affiliation in so small a land, and shows why Victoriannorms prevail in certain areas of twentieth-century life. It also examines more familiar themes--such as the recurrent religious strife and the shaping of new political entities--and offers a special section on the interaction between Irish history and its rich literary tradition. Wide-ranging andhighly readable, this vivid view of Ireland will entertain and inform anyone interested in this fascinating and colorful island nation.

    A few years ago, Mark Adams made a strange discovery: Everything we know about the lost city of Atlantis comes from the work of one man, the Greek philosopher Plato. Then he made a second, stranger discovery: Amateur explorers are still actively searching for this sunken city all around the world, based entirely on the clues Plato left behind. Exposed to the Atlantis obsession, Adams decides to track down these people and determine why they believe it’s possible to find the world’s most famous lost city and whether any of their theories could prove or disprove its existence. He visits scientists who use cutting-edge technology to find legendary civilizations once thought to be fictional. He examines the numerical and musical codes hidden in Plato’s writings, and with the help of some charismatic sleuths traces their roots back to Pythagoras, the sixth-century BC mathematician. He learns how ancient societies transmitted accounts of cataclysmic events—and how one might dig out the “kernel of truth” in Plato’s original tale.Meet Me in Atlantis is Adams’s enthralling account of his quest to solve one of history’s greatest mysteries; a travelogue that takes readers to fascinating locations to meet irresistible characters; and a deep, often humorous look at the human longing to rediscover a lost world.

    With Connemara, he creates an indelible portrait of a small corner of the world. From the unmarked graves of unbaptized infants to the shimmering peaks of the Twelve Pins, Robinson brings his close attention and dazzling prose to describe the mountains, bogs, shorelines, and landscape of his home and, at the same time, make a great statement about the world at large.

    Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a brilliant, often comedic guidebook for those "fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims" making their way through the complexities of their own lives and times.

    The great heritage of western civilization - from the Greek and Roman classics to Jewish and Christian works - would have been utterly lost were it not for the holy men and women of unconquered Ireland. In this delightful and illuminating look into a crucial but little-known "hinge" of history, Thomas Cahill takes us to the "island of saints and scholars, " the Ireland of St. Patrick and the Book of Kells. Here, far from the barbarian despoliation of the continent, monks and scribes laboriously, lovingly, even playfully preserved the west's written treasures. With the return of stability in Europe, these Irish scholars were instrumental in spreading learning. Thus the Irish not only were conservators of civilization, but became shapers of the medieval mind, putting their unique stamp on western culture.

    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.

    In six hundred years, the Celts had produced some of the finest artistic and scientific masterpieces of the ancient world. In 58 BC, Julius Caesar marched over the Alps, bringing slavery and genocide to western Europe. Within eight years the Celts of what is now France were utterly annihilated, and in another hundred years the Romans had overrun Britain. It is astonishing how little remains of this great civilization. While planning a bicycling trip along the Heraklean Way, the ancient route from Portugal to the Alps, Graham Robb discovered a door to that forgotten world--a beautiful and precise pattern of towns and holy places based on astronomical and geometrical measurements: this was the three-dimensional "Middle Earth" of the Celts. As coordinates and coincidences revealed themselves across the continent, a map of the Celtic world emerged as a miraculously preserved archival document.Robb--"one of the more unusual and appealing historians currently striding the planet" (New York Times)--here reveals the ancient secrets of the Celts, demonstrates the lasting influence of Druid science, and recharts the exploration of the world and the spread of Christianity. A pioneering history grounded in a real-life historical treasure hunt, The Discovery of Middle Earth offers nothing less than an entirely new understanding of the birth of modern Europe.

    The pages are populated with figures from myth, history, and the present-from Saint Patrick to Oliver Cromwell, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Charles Parnell to Sinead O'Connor and Bono. Some beloved, some controversial-each influenced the course of Irish and world history. While McCourt vividly describes Ireland's turbulent history, he also offers a cultural survey with fresh insights to the folklore, literature, art, music, and cuisine of Ireland, producing an irresistible tour through the Emerald Isle.

    A member of one of the leading Norman families involved in the invasion of Ireland, he first visited there in 1183 and later returned in the entourage of Henry II. The resulting Topographia Hiberniae is an extraordinary account of his travels. Here he describes landscapes, fish, birds and animals; recounts the history of Ireland's rulers; and tells fantastical stories of magic wells and deadly whirlpools, strange creatures and evil spirits. Written from the point of view of an invader and reformer, this work has been rightly criticized for its portrait of a primitive land, yet it is also one of the most important sources for what is known of Ireland during the Middle Ages.

    Following in the grand tradition of such Irish memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and Are You Somebody?, Liam Clancy relates his life’s story in a raucously funny and star-studded account of moving from provincial Ireland to the bars and clubs of New York City, to the cusp of fame as a member of Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers. Born in 1935, the eleventh out of as many children, young Liam was a naive and innocent lad of the Old Country. His memories of childhood include bounding over hills, streams, and the occasional mountain, getting lost, and eventually found, and making mischief in the way of a typical Irish boy.As an aimless nineteen-year-old, Clancy met a strange and wonderfully energetic lover of music, Ms. Diane Guggenheim, an American heiress. She and a colleague from America had set out to record regional Irish folk music, and their undertaking led them to Carrick-on-Suir in the shadow of Slievenamon, "The Mountain of the Women," where Mammie Clancy had been known to carry a tune or two in her kitchen. Guggenheim fell for young Liam and swept him along on her travels through the British Isles, the American Appalachians, and finally Greenwich Village, the undisputed Mecca for aspiring artists of every ilk in the late 1950s. Clancy was in New York to become an actor. But on the side, he played and sang with his brothers, Paddy and Tom, and fellow countryman Tommy Makem, in pubs like the legendary White Horse Tavern. In the heady atmosphere of the Village, Clancy’s life was a party filled with music, sex, and McSorley’s. His friendships with then-unknown artists such as Bob Dylan, Maya Angelou, Robert Redford, Lenny Bruce, Pete Seeger and Barbra Streisand form the backdrop of the charming adventures of a small-town boy making it big in the biggest of cities. In music circles, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem are known as the Beatles of Irish music. The band’s music continues to play on jukeboxes in pubs and bars, in living rooms of folk music fans, and in Irish American homes throughout the country. Liam Clancy’s lively memoir captures their wild adventures on the road to fame and fortune, and brings to life a man who never lets himself off the hook for his sins, and happily views his success as a blessing.From the Hardcover edition.

    Among the commoners in the GPO was a young staff captain of the Irish Volunteers named Michael Collins. He was joined a day later by a fourteen-year-old messenger boy, Eoin Kavanagh. Four days later they would all surrender, but they had struck the match that would burn Great Britain out of Ireland for the first time in seven hundred years.The 13th Apostle is the reimagined story of how Michael Collins, along with his young acolyte Eoin, transformed Ireland from a colony into a nation. Collins’s secret weapon was his intelligence system and his assassination squad, nicknamed “The Twelve Apostles.” On November 21, 1920, the squad—with its thirteenth member, young Eoin—assassinated the entire British Secret Service in Dublin. Twelve months and sixteen days later, Collins signed the Treaty at 10 Downing Street, which brought into being what is, today, the Republic of Ireland.An epic novel in the tradition of Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French and Leon Uris’s Trinity, The 13th Apostle is a story that will capture the imagination and hearts of freedom-loving readers everywhere.

    Ten chapters look at the archaeology of the druids, celtic practices, the classical literature, sacrifices, prophecy, female druids in celtic society, sacred places and priests, druids in Irish mythology, the 18th and 19th century revivals, and modern beliefs. The bibliography is accompanied by a directory of modern druid organizations.

    Measured in terms of mortality, the Great Irish Potato Famine was the worst disaster in the nineteenth century--it claimed twice as many lives as the American Civil War. A perfect storm of bacterial infection, political greed, and religious intolerance sparked this catastrophe. But even more extraordinary than its scope were its political underpinnings, and The Graves Are Walking provides fresh material and analysis on the role that Britain's nation-building policies played in exacerbating the devastation by attempting to use the famine to reshape Irish society and character. Religious dogma, anti-relief sentiment, and racial and political ideology combined to result in an almost inconceivable disaster of human suffering.This is ultimately a story of triumph over perceived destiny: for fifty million Americans of Irish heritage, the saga of a broken people fleeing crushing starvation and remaking themselves in a new land is an inspiring story of revival.Based on extensive research and written with novelistic flair, The Graves Are Walking draws a portrait that is both intimate and panoramic, that captures the drama of individual lives caught up in an unimaginable tragedy, while imparting a new understanding of the famine's causes and consequences.