My Book Reviews

Staring at Lakes: A memoir of Love, Melancholy and Magical Thinking (Hachette Books, Ireland, 2013) by Michael Harding. My copy of Harding's book Harding is an outstanding Irish author, playwright, novelist and actor who writes a column in The Irish Times .  It is not surprising at all that this memoir won the non-fiction book of the year at the Irish Book Awards, 2013. If I were asked for a comparable book in the memoir line here in Ireland, I should have to point to Nuala O'Faolain's equally moving   Are You Somebody? : The accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1996). Both books are written with such a white-hot honesty that the searing truth burns into the page and keeps the reader gripped in such an intensity that one simply does not want to put the book down until one is finished.  I read Harding's book in one sitting, just like I did O'Faolain's book.  In existential terms, one is caught by the sheer authe...

Sustaining a Theme 2 My last post finished with a review of David Maraniss's biography of William Jefferson Clinton, a fairly objective account by an unauthorized biographer that concluded with his declaration that he would run for President in October 1991 at the end of a 32 minute speech at The Old State House in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Maraniss writes wonderfully clear prose as one would expect from a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.  In one of his concluding paragraphs he writes: His mother was there to hear him say those words.  She had been waiting to hear them since he was a boy.  She was the one who taught him how to block things out and to keep going through tough times.  She gave him his perseverance and his optimism.  Now she was determined to play out one final act of will.  Four months earlier her doctor had told her that her breast cancer had spread and that she was dying.  She had not told her son.  She hoped not to te...

Sustaining a Theme 1 My copies of these two books Now that I have reviewed several books on JFK and his brother Bobby, I suppose it would be no surprise if I were to review several books about and by President William Jefferson Clinton.  I also got to listen to this great American leader in College Green on December 1, 1995 where 80, 000 people listened attentively and with occasional cheers as he addressed the citizens of Dublin from a platform outside the Bank of Ireland, that is the old parliament building directly opposite Trinity College.  The link for this writer here is that in June 1963 William Jefferson Clinton as a 17 year old student (when he had been elected as the Arkansas representative to the American Legion's Boys State) met his hero President John F. Kennedy who was also, as I have stated in the post immediately before this one, an Irish hero, on a par in the then Ireland of the early 1960s with the Pope in Rome. There is even a famous photograph of t...

Passion Before I indicate the books that I wish to review here let me say some brief words on the topic of passion.  It has long been my belief that love or desire or passion for one's career counts for a lot.  I had wanted to become a teacher since I was a young boy of ten.  Why? Quite simply, because I was awe-struck by the ability to teach of an old teacher near his retirement.  This man was still enthusiastic and still interested in his students after many years of teaching. Indeed, I remember telling my mother that I wished to be a teacher like Mr. Murray because I had learnt so much from him with such a singular ease.  It was not solely down to me at all, though I was a good student.  There was something about Mr Murray that I intuitively admired, and looking back at it after all these years (46 to be precise), that one thing was his passion for and his commitment to or enthusiasm for his job. Some people write off this quality far too easily i...

Review of The Tao of Psychology by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1982, pp. 103. My copy of this book with the actual blog post in the background Jean Shinoda Bolen, M. D. is a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst, and an internationally known author and speaker. She is the author of many books and scholarly articles and her works have been translated into over eighty languages.  Dr Bolen is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco. Her academic achievements and her memberships of prestigious international committees for one humanitarian cause or another are listed on her personal website here:  HERE . I have written about synchronicity elsewhere in my blogs: See  Synchronicity . Here, in this short but scholarly book, Dr Bolen explores the intriguing interrelationship between this phenomenon of  "meaningfu...

I mmortality by Milan Kundera My battered copy of this novel The novel I am going to discuss in this short post is Immortality  by Milan Kunders, Faber and Faber, London, 1992, translated by Peter Kussi. This is an extraordinary book to say the least. If the reader is expecting the usual plot structure over a fixed period of time then s/he will be disappointed.  I don’t know quite how I would describe this novel, but it most certainly is postmodern plus a unique Kundera-esque take on fiction. Kundera, born 1929, is the Czech Republic's most recognized living writer. However, he has lived in exile in France since 1975 and has become a naturalized citizen in 1981. Somewhat like Ireland’s own Nobel Laureate, Samuel Beckett, Kundera sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores. The book that we are discussing here, with its imposing abstract and heavy title, Immort...