Peter Costello
Anthony Redmond
I have no hesitation in saying that the book that made the biggest impression on me, not just this year, but for quite a few years, is Letters from Aleppo by Fr Ibrahim Alsabagh (Columba Press, € 14.99). It is a wonderfully moving and powerful account of a dedicated priest’s daily life in Aleppo in Syria.
He describes in graphic detail the suffering and struggles of his parishioners and others amidst the daily horrors of everyday life in Syria. His unwavering devotion to his people, his profound compassion and love for them is deeply moving and his determination to keep hope alive is truly inspiring and uplifting.
His story brings home to us the evil of fanatical extremism and how it has caused such barbarism and unspeakable suffering in the beautiful and ancient land of Syria.
Fr Ibrahim Alsabagh is a true representative of the love of God. He shows us that God is all about compassion, concern, and immeasurable love and has absolutely nothing to do with hatred, cruelty and violence. This important message needs to be emphasised and lived out in practice.
Letters from Aleppo is truly inspirational.
Frank Litton
We live in troubling times. Yet, today’s Catholic thinkers have little to say. Preoccupied with attacking or defending Pope Francis, when they do engage with the world they have little to offer but lamentations and condemnations. It was not always so. We too readily forget the contributions made by an older generation of Catholic thinkers, for example, Jacque Maritain’s support for The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Nicholas Boyle’s critique of neo-liberalism, and Charles Taylor’s monumental work on secularism.
All three are discussed in Dominick F. Doyle’s The Promise of Christian Humanism: Thomas Aquinas on Hope (The Crossroad Publishing Company/Independent Publishers Group, £33.50). Doyle discusses Aquinas’ understandings of the theological virtues, faith, charity and how hope especially can strengthen and renew their Christian humanism. We learn not only of the philosophical acuity of Aquinas’s account but also its psychological depth and spiritual richness.
With the gift of hope, we have the courage to see beyond the failures of our broken condition to a world created and redeemed by God that needs the fruits of our faith and the work of our charity.
Of course, we learn the best lessons in the virtues from the lives of committed Christians. Dorothy Day was one of the most inspiring Catholics of the 20th Century.
Kate Hennessey provides us with an intimate portrait of her grandmother in Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty (Scribner, £11.99pb). Inspired by radical Christian humanism, Day brought faith, hope and charity down to Earth. We learn from her what a hope-full engagement with the world is. We learn from Doyle where we can find the intellectual resources to support it.
Mary Kenny
Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break (Jonathan Cape, £14.99) rang a lot of bells with me – an older couple on a break in Amsterdam, Stella with some fanciful idea of joining the “Beguine” order of religious lay-women, Gerry covertly drinking far too much. Their marriage is strong, but their differences are rooted in religion – she has the faith, he’s scornful of it.
The Bonjour Effect – The Secret Codes of French Conversation (Gerald Duckworth, £9.99pb), by a French-Canadian couple, Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, issued in paperback this year, is a great book about understanding the French. It is vital, in France, to begin a conversation with the “formule de politesse” – “Bonjour” being the example.
But there are so many hidden cultural quirks – the authors stress that the first instinct of the French, particularly in bureaucracies, is to say ‘no’ to everything: you have to learn to work your way around this reflex. Also: “They’re not so good at debate because expression is more important than communication.” Anyone even tangentially involved in Brexit negotiations would benefit from this – and it’s very amusing too.
Kenneth Francis’s The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth (St Paul’s Publishing, £8.95; sales@stpauls.org.uk) is a knowledgeable, accessible and encouraging short book on cosmology and philosophy. Highly recommended.
Christopher Moriarty
Rupert Sheldrake combines the application of a scientist working by the strictest professional rules with an erudite study of spiritual and other matters which are not amenable to these rules.
Science and Spiritual Practices (Coronet, £20.00) is the latest in a number of seminal works that he has produced. It ranges widely, taking in aspects of his own personal life and development, advice on physical and spiritual practices that support health, long life and wellbeing and a trenchant rebuttal of aspects of atheism and secularism.
Dublin Bay is very much more than a totally delightful seaside on the doorstep of tens of thousands of Irish people. It is recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site and it also provides a passage way for about three quarters of the imports and exports of our country.
The three authors Richard Nairn, David Jeffry and Rob Goodbody in Dublin Bay: Nature and History (Collins Press, €24.99) present a scholarly and highly readable study of the bay, possibly the most comprehensive account of any part of Ireland ever written.
Felix M. Larkin
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Bloomsbury, £18.99) won the Man Booker Prize this year. It is an extraordinary book, set in the cemetery where the body of the young son of Abraham Lincoln, who died in February 1862, has been deposited.
Lincoln visits his son’s crypt alone at night after the committal – that much is factual.
In the novel, however, his son and some others interred in the cemetery remain in a state of transition between death and the afterlife – called, in Tibetan tradition, the “bardo”. The strange interaction that occurs between the grieving President, his son and the other ghostly characters is interspersed with extracts from genuine historical sources, and it reveals Lincoln’s plight in trying to come to terms with his personal loss. More significantly, it also confirms his resolve to proceed with the bloody Civil War then raging in America despite the cost in lives lost.
What is at stake in the Civil War, Lincoln realises, is whether the United States – “something that had begun so well” – would survive, and “if it went off the rails … it would be said (and said truly): the rabble cannot manage itself”.
He concludes: “Well, the rabble could. The rabble would. He would lead the rabble in managing.”
This represents real insight into Lincoln’s noble character – so unlike that of the current US president. It is hard to credit that the Republican Party in the United States can claim both Lincoln and Donald Trump.
J. Anthony Gaughan
My “best book of the year”, of immense interest and lasting value, was Gerard J. Lyne’s Murtaí Óg Ó Súilleabháin: A Life Contextualised (Geography Publications, €25.00). Murtaí Óg, a member of the O’Sullivan Beare clan, was born c. 1710. Educated on the continent, he attended a military academy in Spain and fought in the War of the Austrian Succession.
For his services, he was promoted to captain in Lord Clare’s regiment of the Irish Brigades and fought at Fontenoy. Returning home he was involved in smuggling and recruiting for the armies of France.
Initially in his smuggling enterprise, he was in league with a local loyalist named John Puxley. But Puxley was eventually ‘turned’ by the government and commissioned to curb smuggling in the Beara Peninsula. Thereafter the inevitable enmity between them ended with Murtaí Óg ambushing and shooting Puxley in 1754. Within the year Murtaí Óg was shot by soldiers attempting to capture him.
Gerard Lyne succeeds admirably in setting Murtaí Óg in his historical context. He provides an expert analysis of the socio-economic conditions of the period, and the curious interface between the old Gaelic chieftain families and the local representatives of the new regime.
And he reveals what remained in the Beara Peninsula of what Daniel Corkery once famously called ‘The Hidden Ireland’.
Ian D’Alton
As an historian of 20th Century Ireland, one book that I looked forward reading in the course of 2017 would have been a substantial reappraisal of the Irish Convention, 1917-18. It was the last occasion that clerics directly contributed to an Irish constitutional assembly. Such a study would have been a substantial contribution to this “decade of remembrance” But nothing appeared.
That was a pity; but it was more than made up by – for this writer – the publishing event of the year, the appearance of the Atlas of the Irish Revolution (Cork University Press, €59.00). This is quite literally a coffee-table book; fit four legs to the massive tome, and you would have a serviceable piece of furniture. At 1,000 pages or so, its encyclopedic breadth covers everything from guns to roses – well, the Easter Lily, anyway.
What makes the book attractive are its short, accessible pieces, and that it attempts, with some considerable success, to put the revolutionary period into a continuum, an historical context.
There’s a stellar cast of contributors, from such as Martin Mansergh, Roy Foster, Catriona Crowe, Frank Callanan, Joe Duffy (yes, that Joe Duffy) and Joe Lee – and all at a startlingly modest price. What’s not to like? Go out and buy one!
Peter Hegarty
The Raqqa Diaries: Escape from ‘Islamic State’, by Samer. Edited by Mike Thomson (Hutchinson, £9.99). In almost unbearably graphic prose Samer – a pseudonym – describes life in Raqqa before the recent liberation of the city.
It was a place in which atrocities were everyday, where people walked past crucifixes from which decapitated bodies hung. Food was scarce and expensive, electricity rationed, rubbish piled up in deserted streets. IS sent children to the front lines as the end approached.
The jihadists were as hypocritical as they were cruel, with one set of rules for themselves, and another for those they governed. Fighters punished civilians for engaging in homosexual acts by throwing them from the tops of tall buildings, while jihadists guilty of similar offences received only a lashing.
Samer and his fellow activists are determined to keep the world informed about events in Syria, mindful of 1982, when Hafez al-Assad killed as many as 20,000 people in the city of Homs, in one of the most under-reported massacres in recent history.
The wives and children of the jihadists now languish in refugee camps, despised and ostracised. Will someone extend a hand to these outcasts before some mutation of IS does so?
John Wyse Jackson
A Forgotten Man: The Life and Death of John Lodwick, by Geoffrey Elliott (I.B. Tauris, £20.00). I have been seeking out and reading John Lodwick’s work, on and off, for some 40 years, with much enjoyment, though in that time have met only a handful of people who had ever even heard of him. His best books, produced in the two decades after World War II, were novels (or perhaps ‘entertainments’ in the Graham-Greenean sense), witty, exciting and cynical in equal measure.
They were acclaimed by writers as diverse as Somerset Maugham and Anthony Burgess. So mysteriously forgotten had he become, however, as the title of this book makes plain, that I was amazed that his biography had been written. I loved it.
Though information about him remains elusive, Elliott has done the best he can, and confirms many of the rumours about Lodwick – his great love was a surrealist artist, Sheila Legge – his annual manuscripts arrived at Heinemann stained with Spanish wine – he had a brave but somewhat rackety war record.
What I had not known, though, was that in the 1930s he was a starving ‘journalist’ in Dublin, mixing in theatrical, literary and imbibing circles. This biography has discovered very little about these years – if any Irish Catholic readers know of the slightest trace of his presence in Ireland, I would be fascinated to hear from them!
Joe Carroll
The most interesting book I read this year is The Age of Atheists: How we Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God by Peter Watson (Simon & Schuster, US$ 19.99).
The author is a well known historian of intellectual ideas and journalist. In this he has a huge field to cover. His aim is to show how scientists, philosophers, theologians even, artists, novelists and poets have tried to fill the gap since Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God in the late 19th Century.
For Christians it is a challenging book as Watson relentlessly traces the efforts by intellectuals and artists to dismiss belief in an Absolute. For Irish readers, his treatment of Seamus Heaney is especially interesting as one of the modern poets who seek an alternative to God, while leaving room for some type of transcendence.
Watson seems to have read everything on his subject, linking the 20th Century’s fascination with phenomenology to its rejection of God, or should it be the other way round?
The book presumably did not have space (it is over 500 pages) to consider scientists, artists, novelists and poets (and there are many of them) who have maintained belief in God.
This book was also published in the UK as The Age of Nothing (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99 ), the title of the paperback now available here. Could the title, a selling point in US, have been changed so as not to offend the sensitivities of British atheists?
Peter Costello
My choice is dictated by a long term interest in the life and novels of Joseph Conrad, the Pole who became British and demonstrated in himself some of the absurdities of nationalism. In The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (William Collins £25.00), Maya Jasanoff by concentrating on a select few of Conrad’s most important novels presents him through his fictions set in the far East Africa and Europe as an artist fully in command of the fate of a world increasingly eon, controlled by forces of finance and nature often beyond the control of the single individuals. Though oddly the author neglects Under Western Eyes, he does deal with Nostromo, generally reckoned to be Conrad’s most important novel, along with The Secret Agent, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness and Nostromo.
This allows him to discuss the global Conrad in Europe the Far East, Africa and Latin American. The Conrad we read in our youth seemed an exotic creature dealing with distant island and peoples. But as Henry James lamented in a letter to Conrad the sailor knew things for use in literature than were far beyond his more genteel knowledge.
Today Conrad seems to be a far sighted artist of extraordinary prescient. For many readers this will certainly be the most important book of the year.