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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.
Reviews
"[an] astute analysis ..."
"It's a lesson that feels particularly relevant in the United States today."
"This is an uplifting, almost playful read, with suggestive analysis lying beneath skilful vignettes."
"It is a winning gambit."
"[a] masterly, fascinating and frequently horrifying 'personal history' ..."
"There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase ..."
"What unites them all is O'Toole's moral presence and literary voice: throughout, a sly, understated humor; when needed, passion and even anger."
"O'Toole has a ball in dissecting Charles Haughey and his psychology, and it makes for a gripping portrait; fittingly, given the degree to which Haughey's 'mastery of hypocrisy was mesmerising, exquisite, magisterial', he writes about him more than any other politician."
"Yet his book is never oppressive, not least because O'Toole occasionally lightens the tone."
"Tracing the course of the nation from 1958, the year he was born, into the 21st century, O'Toole shows with devastating detail how the Irish people's willfully blind, secretive disposition shielded them from acknowledging what was going on all around them ..."
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