An essential guide to contemporary Irish letters.
A highly learned but lightly worn literary history of Northern Ireland that reaches beyond books into political and cultural turmoil.
Belfast bookseller Poots opens his brightly opinionated study with the titular Strangers’ House, a long-ago London hostel for foreign sailors. In a poem by Tom Paulin, an Ulster Unionist—a supporter of a Northern Ireland joined to the U.K.—ended up there with “the terrible suspicion that they are mired between Catholic Ireland and indifferent Britain, foreigners everywhere.” Stressing that the divisions in Northern Ireland center on “access to good land and decent employment, combined with competing ideas of what and where home is” more than on religion or ethnicity, Poots draws on literature, beginning in the early 20th century, to examine responses to such matters. It’s often forgotten, for instance, that C.S. Lewis, though a renowned Oxford don, was from Northern Ireland. Writing to an Irish friend in England, he lamented that as much as he loved his home, he despaired of “the invincible flippancy and dullness of the Anglo-Saxon race.” It took Ireland decades to admit that Oscar Wilde was one of its own, and Poots does admirable detective work. He recounts how the lawyer who brought about Wilde's downfall by exposing still-illegal homosexuality went on to found the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force but, on the Republic of Ireland’s achieving independence in 1920, “found that he had presided over the creation of a strange new country, a Protestant statelet that no one could have envisioned at the turn of the century.” Louis MacNeice, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and many other writers figure in the narrative before Poots arrives at the modern triumvirate of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon, who created a literature that, while Irish, was also universal and nonsectarian—and thankfully so, for, as Poots writes, “In the hundred years of Northern Ireland’s existence, there has not been a single poet or novelist of any worth who has succumbed to the cosy certainties of the tribe.”
An essential guide to contemporary Irish letters.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781538701577
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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