February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
FOR THE CAUSE OF LIBERTY
A Thousand Years
of Ireland’s Heroes
Terry Golway
The gang’s all here and they are ready to play. Terry Golway’s work to date on the history of Ireland and Irish America has been a breadth of fresh air in a time when far too many historians are rushing to their battle lines either deifying or trashing those individuals who stand out from the crowd in Irish history. Golway is first and foremost a journalist and he more or less manages to leave his grinding axe in the woodshed when he sits down to present anew the men and women who have stood center-stage during the course of Ireland’s turbulent past. Previously is hardback. Touchstone Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. 395 pp. $15
THE McSORLEY POEMS
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Voices from New York
City’s Oldest Pub
Geoffrey Bartholomew
On a cold winter’s day there are few better places in New York City to be than in McSorley’s Pub, beside the potbelly stove with some crackers, cheese, onions and English mustard, not to mention a brace of dark ales, the house variety. It would almost inspire you to write a verse about it, though most simply get on with the business of quaffing and munching. Geoffrey Bartholomew, on the other hand, has been inspired to write about the place that he has managed for more than 20 years. Charlton Street Press. 112 pp. $14.99.
ECLIPSE
John Banville
John Banville is one of Ireland’s best and most prolific writers. Some critics view the Wexford-born writer as being preeminent among hid peers. In "Eclipse," Banville unveils the story of Alexander Cleave, an actor facing a collapse in his career who returns to his abandoned childhood home, the one place in the world where he feels he can be himself, an individual person minus an audience. But, as he quickly discovers, a home is not abandoned simply because it is empty. Alfred A. Knopf. 212 pp. $23.
FOR THE LOVE OF IRELAND
A Literary Companion
for Readers and Travelers
Edited by Susan Cahill
An open road and a good book in the bag. In today’s Ireland it might not be as easy as it once was to find an open road, but, thankfully, good books and writers still abound. Susan Cahill, who has traveled this literary path before with "Desiring Italy," brings together an anthology of more than 50 selections in which leading Irish writers from James Joyce and William Butler Yeats to Edna O’Brien and Seamus Heaney reveal their love of and attachment to particular places. Ballantine. 458 pp. $14.95.