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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.

It would be easy to imagine a book with a title like the one this has, would be a dry and dull academic volume. It is anything but. The book does cover ‘2500 years of Irish history through the lives of some fifty people’, the author succeed in his stated goal of sharing this history as ‘a collection of stories that one might share across a kitchen table about people we once knew.’ The people in the stores range from characters in Irish mythology, to leaders in Ireland’s fight for independence, to the lead singer of the Irish rock group U2, Bono.

This was a very fast read, as each of the stories typically ran just a few pages, so it was always easy to keep on reading late and night and agree with myself to stop for the night after ‘just one more’. And by the end I was left feeling exactly as Malachy intended, as if I had spent a very late night, listening to him tell these stories across a kitchen table. This was a great read and one I’d recommend to anyone wo is interested in Irish history.

I was really enjoying this book a few weeks ago, when I ran into an unusual hurdle. When I reached the second photo section and tried to continue reading on the other side, I lost all track of the story. Dick Tracy that I am, I quickly found the cause, the pages after the photo section picked up about 40 pages after where they had left off. Someone drinking on the job at the publishing house I suppose. Regardless, I was enjoying the read enough to get back to Borders and order up a replacement copy.

The premise of the book is an interesting one, as it all springs from a drunken bet. Tony Hawks (a British comic, not the skateboarder), told some friends at a party of having once seen a man hitchhiking in Ireland with a full size refrigerator. He got a skeptical reply, offered a drunken boast, and the next day woke up with a hangover and a signed note by which he had accepted a bet of 100 pounds that he could not hitchhike around the entire Emerald Isle with a fridge in tow. His route was flexible, with the only condition being that he visit a specific coastal island at the norther and southern ends of the country.

The book is a fun read. Tony comes off as a friendly and likable guy, the sort you’d enjoy having a few pints with in an Irish pub, quizzing him on exactly why it was he was traveling around Ireland with a fridge. And the locals welcomed him with generosity and admiration for his undertaking such a fine, pointless excursion.

We won’t be taking a fridge with us on our trip. But Tony’s travel tales were entertaining, and it’s hard not to respect someone who follows through on even their most outrageous drunken bets.