Christmas and the New Year are the most important marketing periods for the book trade. The shops are filled, not only with their normal stock, but a flood of special seasonal “present” books, most of which will be of little real interest in a month or so. To help readers navigate this swamp of printed…
The reopening of Notre Dame, which took place finally on December 8, is one of the great ecclesiastical events of the year, saved for the final days of 2024, giving the world something real to celebrate. The restoration of the cathedral, as previous articles in these pages have noted, has been a task fraught with…
The selected choices of our reviewers Joe Carroll My choice is tripartite: Patrick Kavanagh: Collected Poems, Tarry Flynn and the biography of the poet by Antoinette Quinn, none of them new, but still to be found in the shops. On a visit to the Patrick Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen I picked up a new…
Since the recovery of a lost Caravaggio of the very greatest importance in the dining room of a Jesuit residence in Dublin, a work of art now safely enshrined in the National Gallery, there has been a continuing interest in Caravaggio across Ireland. A portrait of created by Caravaggio has just gone on show in…
Newman and His Critics, by Edward Short – (Gracewing, £35.00 pb / £65.00 hb) This large and very detailed book, running to some 600 pages, is one of three which the author has written on John Henry Newman. He has already published Newman and His Contemporaries and Newman and His Family. Those earlier volumes are now again available to make…
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick (Penguin, £23.00 / €27.50); also The First Thanksgiving, a single chapter extract from the original book, is also available separately from Penguin booklet. Today is Thanksgiving Day in the US. These books give a popular historical account of the Pilgrim Fathers, which broadens out the…
Ireland and the Crusades, edited by Edward Coleman, Paul Duffy & Tadgh O’Keefe (Four Courts Press, €49.50 / £41.50) I cannot be the only one who has wondered over the years about medieval Crusaders from Ireland. Across Western Europe, from Scotland to Sicily, the adventures and misadventures of these knights of the Red Cross…
Praying with the Bible: An Ignatian Guide, by Nikolas Sintobin (Messenger Publications, €14.95 / £12.95) This book, written in a very accessible style, provides lessons in reading the scriptures from an Ignatian point of view and should find a wide readership. At the very start of the Spiritual Exercises Ignatius announces that the first step has to…
“With Angels and Archangels”: Sharing the Worship of Heaven. Bible, Poetry Liturgy and Devotion in the Middle Ages, by John Blakesley (Gracewing, £15.99 / €19.25) For mainstream theologians this sort of liturgical poetry is a rather narrow interest. It addresses not central issues in relation to the understanding and presentation of the Eucharist, but simply…
The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda, by Andrew Fleming (Birlinn, £25.00 / €30.00) The life and culture of our own offshore islands here in Ireland has long played an important part in creating our ideas about what Irish culture as whole is. The books of the islands themselves…