No comments about Henry VIII.

2 comments about An Only Child (Irish Studies).

1. Like Frank, I grew up Catholic, so I greatly enjoyed his account of his childhood and the deftness at which he relayed the characters and situations of his life in early 20th century Northern Ireland. The account of his father's alcoholism and mother's strength in her modesty evokes powerful sentiments that O'Connor is amazingly skilled at.
   
   He overly criticizes the adolescent ideations and development out of his youth (bildungsroman), but it gives insight to his development as a writer (kunstlerroman), of which he is a candid and lucid artist.
   
   I felt the novel creeping a bit in the middle (otherwise I would give it 4 or 5 stars), and the transition is a bit murky to his engaging recount of actions against the British occupation of Northern Ireland and surrounding religious strife. The ridiculous skirmishes and characters are painted with his masterful brush, however, and truly bring the era to life.
   
   It is a story worth the read to the end on many levels.



2. O'Connor is rightly famous mostly for his short stories, but his criticism - both The Lonely Voice and A Mirror In the Roadway - along with this volume of his memoirs, well, they're all just really good. I found this book in a library many years ago and there are a hundred scenes that still spring instantly to life, and sentences that are always going to be part of how I look at the world. He betrays his greatest talent in the fact that the book reads like a collection of wonderful chapters rather than a coherent whole, but each is filled with the spirit of a generous, funny, humane man, one of those rare authors that you wish you could hang out with. The people that assure that books keep getting read seem to be forgetting about O'Connor a little, but the pages they keep alive rarely seem to stay in the blood and brain like his do.

1 comments about Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf..

1. I have no qualifications to write reviews other than an MLS in library science and I am an eclectic reader entirely of nonfiction with only a few exceptions. Because I read all kinds of things, I am fairly tolerant of style, but I must offer a warning to any potential buyer of this book on the basis of writing style. I'm sure there is excellent scholarship here as you would expect since the author is a college teacher. However, in the first paragraph of the book are found the following words/phrases: tropes ... microcosmic forms of colonization, tyranny or warmongering ... inbuilt hierarchy ... learning toward the metaphor ... traditionally conceived actuality ... etc. Now this style is a shame because the title sounded like just what I was looking for and the two people who are the subject of the book surely should make an interesting study. But with a writing style like this, I can't imagine anyone but scholars would want to slog through the jargon in order to arrive at the content. Sorry to be so critical, but I wanted a study of the people and I didn't find it.

No comments about Jonathan Swift: The Irish Identity.

1 comments about Last Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes.

1. This book skims the surface nicely, gently in much the way the debs themselves approached conversation. Little controversy. The author's personal memories and her follow up on the debs many years later are very nice reading. However, the book for me was spoiled by an ridiculous attempt to paint Princess Diana as the true last deb--barf! The rest of the book is well worth it, just skip the final mawkish, cloying and totally illogical final chapter.

No comments about Haughey's Millions.

No comments about The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby Volume I: Ascent, 1799-1851.

1 comments about Thomas More (Reputations Series).

1. This new book on Thomas More is a must for More fans. Unlike previous biographies which run along like a river of time, the present work wrestles with each part of More's life and character as questions, always attempting to put the known historical facts alongside the accumulated tradition and hagiography surrounding this great man. Professor Guy demonstrates a clear knowledge of the work of other of More's biographers, and has a keen ability to critically discuss them. While the synopis on the back cover warns that those 'satisfied by an idealized vision of More...should not read this book', nothing could be farther from the truth. The book does not attempt to knock down More, but rather to ask some hard historical questions, and if it asks more questions than it answers it is all the better for it. The final assesment of More is left for the reader. Professor Guy makes some astute observations which many historians in the past have taken for granted, for example the link often made with the idyllic picture painted by Erasmus in his letter to Hutten of More's and Holbein's famous painting of the More household in Chelsea. Guy points out that Erasmus never knew More in the house at Chelsea, but only stayed for a short time in More's house in the city of London. Guy also highlights the supposed 'silence' of More with regards to the Act of Supremacy and writes that More 'conyeyed what he really thought to almost anyone who would listen in coded but "safe" language, while pretending to keep "silence"'. The book, however, does not deal only with More's life and the shibboleths surrounding it, but the ways in which More's life and character have been interpreted by the succeeding generations: understanding him as everything from a Protestant 'avant le lettre' to an icon of Communist Russia complete with a memorial to him in Moscow's Alexandrovsky Gardens. Throughout the work one can sense Professor Guy's genuine respect, admiration and even love for Thomas More (warts and all) and it is this ultimately which makes the book such a pleasant read for More fans.

No comments about From Pardon to Protest: Memoirs from the Margins.

1 comments about The Windsor Style.

1. The Windsors, while they were living, epitomized style, glamour, and wit. Ultimately theirs was a wasted life, empty of meaning in the end. From the heady days of their scandalous romance, life was all downhill, a private struggle to conserve their dignity in the aftermath of the abdication. To fill this emptiness and lack of purpose in life, the Duchess obsessed on perfection; of herself, of the things she collected and of the table she set. The Windsor's sous chef spent hours sorting salad leaves into leaves of exactly the same size to be set before their guests. Their relationship was a hollow recreation of the childhood the Duke never could leave behind. Moulin de la Tuilerie, their country home outside of Paris, was the York Cottage of Edward's youth reborn. Wallis herself was Queen Mary, obsessively arranging the display of small objets and cosseting the little boy who was King. A long time servant said, "They had nothing and no-one. They were just two lonely old people." Suzy Menkes takes the reader on an interesting tour through not only of the tangible objects of this relationship, but of the relationship itself.