Peter Costello
Some of our regular reviewers present their choice of a ‘Book of the Year for 2022’, a very varied and enticing selection covering a wide range of topics.
Christopher Moriarty
My choice for a book of the year falls upon Eoghan Daltun’s An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey Into the Magic of Rewilding (Hachette, Books Ireland, €22.95). This remarkable book by a writer of many talents combines a wealth of information on the environment and its needs with one man’s personal journey and success in creating a specimen of the type of vegetation which once clothed large areas of Ireland and of dry land the world over.
The author is a sculptor by profession and an apostle for the ‘re-wilding’ of the world. A little more than ten years ago, he moved from Dublin to the Beara Peninsula in Cork and proceeded to restore 30 acres of severely damaged native oakwood to its pristine glory.
The results became apparent in a remarkably short time. This book describes in very readable detail both some aspects of his own life and progress, together with the intricacies and beauties of the forest habitat and the need to restore much of it in the interests of humanity itself.
Mary Kenny
The book which most clearly explained the “woke” culture, at least for me, was by a British writer of Irish parents, Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans (Constable, €28.00). “Social justice warriors” have effectively become the dominant forces in our society today. Doyle calls this a new religion, but without the self-reflection or examination of one’s own sins of traditional Christianity. Fascinating and alarming.
Visiting France after lockdown rekindled my interest in French culture and history and Peter Watson’s The French Mind (Simon & Schuster, €42.00), was a pleasurable voyage through “400 Years of romance, revolution and renewal”, accessibly written in sections, according to the reader’s special interests.
The most beautifully-written book I read was Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island (Doubleday Ireland, €13.99). He writes such poetic prose and captures old rhythmic ways of Irish speech, along with allusions to enduring aspects of our tradition: the rituals of novenas and Holy Wells – along with the profane, to be sure!
Ian d’Alton
My book in 2022 has to be the new book by Finola Kennedy, Local matters – parish, local government and community in Ireland (Insitute of Public Administration, €25.00)
This has cantered up the rails late in 2022, only published recently. Finola Kennedy, well-known both in Church and academic circles, has penned a thought-provoking book exploring the importance of building our ‘social capital’ – often ignored in the rush to increase economic development.
Perhaps unfashionably – but persuasively – she still sees a place for the Catholic parish in that endeavour, acting as a bridge between the secular and the sacred.
To this Church of Ireland reviewer there is a familiar ring to it – the Protestant community has had a long history of trying to find place and space in an environment which it no longer dominates.
Dr Kennedy’s illuminating and excellently-written book is a workshop manual for charting a relevance for the Catholic Church in Ireland in the 21st century. It is highly commended.
Joe Carroll
My choice, for my personal book of the year is Ireland and Argentina in the Twentieth Century, by Dermot Keogh (Cork University Press. €39)
For anyone interested in Ireland’s links with Argentina from the mid-19th Century up to the present, Dermot Keogh’s 560-page book will be invaluable. The sub-title reveals its scope: Diaspora, diplomacy, dictatorship, Catholic mission and the Falklands crisis.
The book is the result of Keogh’s long personal involvement in Argentina and his numerous contacts there over many years. To this can be added his professional interest in Latin American affairs and extensive knowledge of Vatican archives.
Ireland’s relations with Argentina from famine times are overshadowed by our close links with the United States. Keogh’s book will help to correct this imbalance.
His analysis of how the Falklands/Malvinas crisis in 1982 affected the Ireland-Argentina relationship is especially revealing. It put great strain on Irish relations with London, but earned us the lasting gratitude of Argentina. The role of Irish missionaries, especially in education, is also described and analysed.
J. Anthony Gaughan
The most important and timely publication I read during the year was Bishop Michael Smith’s Vatican Council Memories. Like the 16 key documents of the Council, it clearly shows that the Council Fathers succeeded in achieving their aim, namely to update and modernise the Church, while ensuring that it remained aligned with the teaching of Christ, not the spirit of the age.
Bishop Smith is not the only person to share his ‘Vatican Memories’. The late popular Bishop Pat Dunne enjoyed telling this story against himself. As the 2,500 bishops lined up before entering St Peter’s Basilica for the beginning of the Council in 1962 he exchanged greetings with the very tall person beside him, who informed him that he was the archbishop of San Antonio in Texas. On learning that Dunne was auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of Dublin since early 1946 the American reflected for some time and then leaned down and enquired, ‘What did you do?’
Gabriel Fitzmaurice
Of this year’s crop, the book I most treasure is An File Mícheál Ó Gaoithín: The Blasket Painter (Lilliput, €40).
Selected and introduced by the artist Maria Simonds Gooding and augmented by essays from writer Éilís Ní Dhuibhne Almquist and art historian Catherine Marshall, it is a celebration of the paintings of Mícheál Ó Gaoithín, “an file” (the poet) as he was affectionately known.
A writer and poet whose autobiography and poems, translated by Tim Enright, were published by Oxford University Press, he took up painting, encouraged by Simonds Gooding, in the final six years of his life.
Catherine Marshall describes him as “an outsider artist”. He had no formal training in art, yet his paintings vividly tell his story and that of the Blasket islands in all their shapes and moods. His vividly colourful paintings are gorgeously reproduced and are things of beauty and a joy forever.
Felix M. Larkin
An Post has recently published a sumptuous volume, History on a Stamp (An Post, €95.00) showcasing the stamps issued as part of the Decade of Centenaries commemorations between 2013 and 2022.
There were 26 sets of such stamps, with a total of 54 stamps issued. This volume is, first and foremost, an album containing the actual stamps; and they are displayed in a most attractive manner. In addition, the volume includes an extended essay by the UCD art historian, Emily Mark-FitzGerald, in which she outlines and evaluates the stamps as an exercise in national commemoration.
While noting that “a stamp is an inherently humble physical artefact”, she argues that these stamps “express not only political and cultural meanings, but our understandings of the events they commemorate”. This volume thus complements in a very novel way the many scholarly endeavours that the Decade of Centenaries has inspired.
Anthony Redmond
My favourite book this year was Up From the Ashes: A Syrian Doctor’s Story of Sacrifice and Hope, by ‘Dr A’, with Samara Levy (Hodder & Stoughton, €19.99). This is an inspiring story of a Syrian Christian doctor who decided to stay in his country and help as many people as he could after the horrific war broke out there in 2011.
That was the year that monstrous changes took place in Syria with huge numbers of Jihadists flooding into the country with the intention to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad and impose an Islamic regime. Anyone who opposed these violent Jihadists in Syria became a target. ISIS became shorthand for horror and sadism.
The West supported many of these Jihadist rebels. Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo, the Syrian Catholic Archbishop, said that if Assad were forced to go, Syria would become another Libya. We now have the cruel situation where the US has imposed the most terrible sanctions on Syria resulting in dire poverty, hardship, and hunger for the Syrian people. They find it very difficult to feed their children.
‘Dr A’ (he has to remain anonymous for the sake of his family) has decided to stay and help his people in their hour of need. His deeply moving story is one of heroism and love for his country and his people.
Desmond Egan
Christ himself was a great artist: wonderful stories (the Good Samaritan; the Prodigal Son), with a lovely eye for nature (lilies; sparrows; sheep; foxes). He also had that sense of humour, rarely pointed-out (the plank we notice in someone else’s eye; the banter with the woman at the well; the coin tribute to be found in a fish’s mouth), which always seems to accompany the genuine artistic temperament.
English philosopher Roger Scruton even suggests that, “There is a new kind of irony in Christ’s judgments and parables, which look on the spectacle of human folly and wryly show us how to live with it.” It involves distance, the perception that we have here no lasting city.
Through the centuries, the Catholic Church has been associated with great art: in painting, sculpture, poetry, music. Down to our time, that is. What has gone wrong in this century? Flying-saucer churches; bland stained-glass; dilettantish hymns and verse… and worst of all, Disney Christs. Why have those who commission such things lost touch with genuine art and artists? Why has the concept of Beauty become marginalised? And why is there so little interest in defending and promoting it?
In an effort to understand why, I have been reading Richard Niebuhr’s important study, Christ and Culture: Expanded Edition (Harper Collins, €16.28): this is my book of the year.
Aubrey Malone
The Killing of Father Niall Molloy (Mirror Books, £12.99) is a fascinating study of the still-unexplained killing of the priest of the title in 1985. The acquittal of the man responsible still beggars belief. The cosy relationship between the “horsey” set and the judiciary seems to have played a large part in this.
Bob Dylan was supposed to have written the second instalment of his memoirs by now. Instead he’s given us The Philosophy of Modern Song (Simon & Schuster, £35.00), a beautifully written (and beautifully illustrated) description of all the songs he loved growing up, and why.
Did you know Paul Newman wrote an autobiography? The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man (Century, £25.00) has finally been published all those years after his death. It shines the light on many aspects of him I didn’t know about, like problems with alcohol and insecurity. A treasurable tome about a very humane man.
I postponed buying Bono’s memoir Surrender (Hutchinson Heinemann, £25.00), as I find he over-writes and shows off incorrigibly. But when it’s good it’s great.