Fenians, freedmen, and Southern whites: race and nationality in the era of Reconstruction Mitchell Snay (Louisiana State University Press, $40) ISBN 9780807132739What do Southern Klansmen, their politically aroused former slaves and American-based Irish nationalists have in common? Not a lot, it turns out. Mitchell Snay aspires in this ambitious comparative study to tease out a … Read more
McDowell on McDowell: a memoir R. B. McDowell (The Lilliput Press, €20) ISBN 9781843511335 The wonderful French lady who owns Terroirs wine merchants in Dublin once described a wine to me as ‘like an old man getting out of bed in the morning’. Though sceptical of this (and slightly repelled), having drunk the wine I … Read more
That neutral island: a cultural history of Ireland during the Second World War Clair Wills (Faber & Faber, €20) ISBN 9780571234479 Clair Wills’s work integrates two different approaches to history: one focusing on diplomacy and politics, the other on culture and society. She attempts to reverse the trend of concentrating on specific areas of Ireland … Read more
Ariadne’s thread: writing women into Irish history Margaret MacCurtain (Arlen House, €25) ISBN 9781903631423 Like the Venerable Bede, the seventh-century Jarrow monk and ‘father of English history’, Margaret MacCurtain (a.k.a. Sister Ben to thousands of University College Dublin graduates) serenely glides over the troubled waters of Irish historiography opening up new fields, which flower in … Read more
After a break occasioned by our detour to Latin America in the last issue, Bookworm is back. It seems to be an iron rule of publishing that any book relating to the Second World War must have ‘Hitler’ in the title. The latest in the genre is Terence O’Reilly’s Hitler’s Irishmen (Mercier Press, 320pp, €16.99 … Read more