February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
TESTIMONY OF AN IRISH SLAVE GIRL
Kate McCafferty
She does so through the eyes of Cot Daley, a 10-year-old Irish girl snatched from a street in Galway and transported as a slave to Barbados. Cot’s story carries her through from childhood to womanhood, at which point her quest for her long-lost freedom reaches its critical point. USA TODAY has described “Testimony” as strange, compelling, unexpected and unforgettable. Penguin Putnam. 206 pp. $14.
UNTOLD STORIES
Colin Murphy, Lynne Adair
The subtitle of this book is “Protestants in the Republic of Ireland 1922-2002” and the reasoning behind it is that Protestants in the South have suffered from stereotyping down the years every bit as much as their Catholic fellow citizens. Southern Protestants are not all rich and landed, not all slavishly devoted to a fading Anglo-Irish utopia. Most are fiercely proud of their Irishness even as they emerged as some of the most prominent critics of a Free State and later Republic that was overly influenced and sometimes dominated by the Catholic church. Much has changed of course but the story of Irish Protestants is still only partially known. This book includes more than 50 essays, not all of them written by Protestants but all of them designed to increase the understanding of a community that has as much right as any other to lay claim to an Irish past, present and future. Dufour Editions ([610] 458-5005). 222 pp. $24.95.
JOHN B
Gus Smith, Des Hickey
The late John B. Keane’s literary legacy is now fixed but here is the story behind the man from Listowel, Co. Kerry, as seen through the eyes of many of his contemporaries. Keane’s early days as a poet, his rise to fame as a playwright and novelist and his battles with the literary establishment are all chronicled in this biography, updated after Keane’s death in May 2002. Irish Books and Media, Minneapolis ([612] 871-3505). 352 pp. $26.95.
THE LOST HOUSES OF IRELAND
Randal MacDonnell
This hefty tome is a chronicle of some of Ireland’s great houses and castles and the families who lived in them. Twenty-five such places are detailed in the book but only seven of that total are still in private family hands. Some are lost to history while others are now hotels, golf clubs, schools and even prisons and detention centers. Their stories, however, endure and the author, an architectural historian, has matched the text with many archive photographs, the originals of which were lost in a devastating fire. Sterling, New York ([212] 532-7160). 224 pp. $34.95.