Category: Books

I’m still working on getting caught up on my book reports. I’m not sure why, but sharing some brief comments of some sort about what I’ve read here in my blog has become an important last step in my reading process. Maybe I just home to actually refer enough sales to Amazon to someday actually see some small check from them. But whatever… I digress.

Anyone who pays any attention to my reading list knows that I tend heavily to non-fiction. History, biography, and current events are my typical staples. I make a conscious effort to read more fiction, but to me, actual people and events usually capture my attention first. Truth can truly be stranger than fiction. But a good review in the Washington Post had put The Road by Cormac McCarthy on my list of books to look out for. And Oprah almost knocked it off. Not that I don’t imagine that Oprah and I could enjoy the same book. But I wouldn’t want to count myself among those who turn to her to tell me what to read. Thankfully, when I did pick up my copy, the Oprah sticker peeled off easily.

This is a very fast and dark read. It follows the wanderings of a father and his son, known only to the reader as ‘the man’ and ‘the boy’ as they wander through the horrors of a post apocalyptic America. They have only each other, and the few items and what foot they can scavenge. They use their tattered scraps of map to lead them towards the ocean, for which they hold some thin hope might be somehow nicer. But nice things are few and far between in the grim world they wander, and they daily have to consider the question if there is any reason left to go on.

I recommend the book highly to anyone. It’s not a happy book, but still one that’s hard to put down, like not being able to help looking when you drive past a car wreck, looking for something horrible and then regretting it if you actually see it. Everyone should take such a look at what things could be like if we allowed things to go so horribly wrong.

For the last few months I’ve been cramming on Ireland books in preparation for my recent visit there. And now that my trip has come and gone, I expect that although I’m sure to continue reading about Ireland, I will likely change subjects for a while. The Rebels of Ireland by Edward Rutherfurd was a good place to end my run of Ireland-themed reading. I had read much of Irish history to this point, but this piece of historical fiction tied centuries worth if Irish history together through the intertwined lives of several fictional families.

This is actually the second of a two-book series called The Dublin Saga and was preceded by The Princes of Ireland which I have yet to read. The Rebels of Ireland begins in 1597 and spans through the 1916 Easter Uprising and does a great job providing a glimpse at how the major events of Irish history during that timespan might have been experienced by families and individuals. For a hefty 850+ pages in this book, I found they turned very easily. I’ll look forward to backtracking and reading The Princes of Ireland, but maybe after just a brief break to mix up the reading list with some other subject matter for a bit.

I love reading history. And when it comes to history, you can’t often beat a first-person account. I have read a couple of different “Eyewitness to..” type of history books, which are compilations of first-person historical accounts. And so on my current quest for reading about Ireland, I was happy to find ‘Eyewitness to Irish History’. Of the Ireland books I’ve read so far, this was easily my favorite. From Ancient Ireland to recent history of the 90s, the historical accounts in this book give you a front row seat. And interspersed among them are very helpful, context providing text. Here’s one example, describing the aftermath of The Battle of the Boyne.

Althought the conflict at the Boyne was not a significant victory in military terms, for the Jacobite army was able to withdraw, regroup, and fight on for another year, James panicked and fled from Ireland back to St. Germain in France, earning him the title among the Irish of Seamus an Chaca (James the

One moving account is from the diary of Gerald Keegan, an immigrant who recounts setting out for Canada just days after his wedding in 1847, and the tragedy of their trip on what came to be known as a ‘Coffin Ship’ due to the suffering, disease and death that was so pervasive on them. His wife did not survive the trip, and Gerald lived only a few days after arriving in Canada, where he gave his journal to his Uncle, telling him, “It will tell to those unborn what Irishmen and women have suffered in this summer of sorrow.”

And more than any of the history I’ve so far read of Ireland, these accounts brought home the shocking degrees of suffering and oppression that the Irish have suffered for centuries under the English. From evictions, starvation, murder, slavery, deportation… there’s little the Irish haven’t suffered at the hands of the English. It’s a painful history captured in the books final sentences;

James Joyce, in Ulysses, was expressing the feellings of most Irish people when he caused his hero, Stephen Dedalus, to observe: “History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” It is a nightmare from which Ireland is still struggling to awake.

This is an excellent read that I recommend to anyone interested in Irish history.

I love maps, always have. I can spend hours pouring over maps of places both strange and familiar, and I often do (usually with no idea where ‘I’ am). And if a picture is worth a thousand words, a map must likewise be worth at least several hundred. So when I found this book on the shelf at a used book store in Manassas, it was a easy decision to tuck it under my arm with plans to bring it home with me.

Starting with a map of Celtic Ireland dating back to the Iron Age, and progressing through centuries of Viking, Norman, and English invaders, and reaching up to Ireland in the ’90s, each page offers a map of Ireland and one-page of text on a particular era. By itself, the text would be something like a Cliff-Notes version of Irish History, but the complementary maps make all the difference. It’s still a quick skim and fast read, but one that makes up what it lacks in words with some really great maps that give a birds-eye view of Ireland’s history.