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We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland
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About This Book
A quarter-century after Frank McCourt's extraordinary bestseller, Angela's Ashes, Fintan O'Toole, one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, continues the narrative of modern Ireland into our own time. O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. Weaving his own experiences into this account of Irish social, cultural, and economic change, O'Toole shows how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a Catholic "backwater" to an almost totally open society. A sympathetic-yet-exacting observer, O'Toole shrewdly weighs more than sixty years of globalization, delving into the violence of the Troubles and depicting, in biting detail, the astonishing collapse of the once-supreme Irish Catholic Church. The result is a stunning work of memoir and national history that reveals how the two modes are inextricable for all of us.
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Reviews
"O'Toole makes this book both deeply personal and rigorously objective at the same time."
"O'Toole's account ranges well beyond historical grandees to include minor celebrities ..."
"O'Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks."
"But because the events really happened, because they are part of Ireland's shameful, sometimes surreal postwar history, they also have the brutishly obstructive quality of fact, often to be pushed against, fought with, triumphed over, or, in O'Toole's preferred mode of engagement, analyzed into whimpering submission."
"While his sweeping, authoritative and profoundly intelligent book sees modern Ireland through the lens of his own life and that of his family, it also offers sharp and brilliant analysis of what form change took when it arrived in Ireland ..."
"astonishing in its range."
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