BOOK REVIEWS A Sampling of the Latest Irish Books By Tom Deignan Recommended 
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams is credited with moving Irish Republicanism from the bullet to the ballot. Along the way he’s been jailed, shot at, and even now he remains a controversial figure.
Yet few doubt that he is both a fascinating and important figure. Adams now tells the story of “Ireland’s long road to peace” (to use the book’s subtitle) in his latest volume A Farther Shore.
The book chronicles the events that led up to the Good Friday Agreement. Adams’ status as an insider certainly sheds new light on these historic, still-unfolding events.
Adams writes about previously undisclosed discussions between the British government and key Republican figures. He also reveals how the IRA leadership clashed with other Republican elements, which ultimately played a role in the initial end of the IRA’s ceasefire.
The Clinton White House, the Catholic Church and prominent Irish-Americans are also featured, though perhaps more surprising is the extensive role the South African government played in the Irish peace process.
Adams’ U.S. publisher Random House makes A Farther Shore sound a bit like a corporate manual when they say this book of high-stakes global diplomacy “provides a template for conflict resolution.”
Nevertheless, those with an interest in contemporary Irish history will need to read this book, which traces the immediate roots of the peace process to the early 1980s.
“Turning points can suddenly, unexpectedly occur,” Adams writes in his introduction, referring to diverse leaders of liberation movements such as Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela. “In our own time and place, the hunger strikes of 1981 were to have that effect [in Ireland].”
All in all, A Father Shore is an insightful, revealing read. ($25.95 / 412 pages / Random
House) Non-fiction, Fiction and Memoir 
Pete McCarthy gave himself a very enviable task when he set out to write his first best-seller McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in the West of Ireland: visit every McCarthy’s Pub you ever came across in Ireland.
Raised in England, but with a mother from West Cork, McCarthy expands his horizons in The Road to McCarthy. He visits McCarthy’s pubs – and villages, and enclaves and even an Alaskan town with a population of 18 – all over the world.
What sounds so whimsical nevertheless manages to subtly explore the roots of family names in general, and ethnicity in general – in McCarthy’s case, mixed Irish. (The book is dedicated to the “West Cork McCarthys, wherever they may be.”)
McCarthy tracks down a fellow McCarthy in Morocco, and visits Tasmania, the penal colony where so many Irish were sent by the British government. And he puts a new spin on familiar turf, such as the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Always funny, often inebriated, sometimes bordering on obscene, Pete McCarthy nevertheless has found quite a niche. We can only wonder what he will do for a follow-up. McCarthy on the moon, perhaps. ($25.95 / 384 pages / Fourth Estate-Harper Collins)
Thomas Cahill has just published the fourth volume of his acclaimed “Hinges of History” series. The first, of course, was the best-selling How the Irish Saved Civilization. Then came The Gifts of the Jews, and Desire of the Everlasting Hills. These books have topped the bestseller charts in Italy, Brazil and the U.S.
Now, Cahill brings us on a tour of ancient Greece, in Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea. Cahill begins with a look at Homer’s epic poem The Iliad and the role war and warriors played in Greek life. What follows is a dazzling, accessible explanation of how the Greeks, to this day, influence our thoughts on philosophy, art, drama, politics, mathematics and more.
This can seem like heavy stuff, but once again, Cahill has masterfully taken a complex, often dense, topic and fleshed it out nicely for the general reader. From Plato and Socrates to the drama of Sophocles (which gave Freud the character on which he based his famous Oedipus complex), Cahill makes it clear the era centered around 400 B.C. still has a hold on us today. ($27.50 / 304 pages / Nan A.
Talese-Doubleday)
Christopher Fitz-Simon has served as literary manager and artistic director of the Abbey and Peacock Theatres. This year, the former marks its 100th year, and Fitz-Simon does a fine job of tracing the Abbey’s centrality in Irish cultural life in The Abbey Theatre: Ireland’s National Theatre: The First 100 Years.
Yet for all of Fitz-Simon’s knowledge, it is the nearly 200 photos and other illustrations which best capture the richness and vitality for which Dublin’s drama center has been known since 1904. From early stagings of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (which provoked rioting in the streets) to later acclaimed works by Frank McGuinness and Brian Friel, the contemporary history of Irish dramatic literature can be understood through the Abbey. This makes Fitz-Simon’s book not only entertaining, but important. ($27.50 / 208 pages / Thames and Hudson)
Speaking of great Irish drama and striking photographs, Images of Beckett by John Haynes and James Knowlson is one of the more unusual, yet still engaging books you will come across. The title is a bit misleading. The book does have over 75 illustrations. But the text is actually just as important in this book as the pictures, which include images of the author, as well as of productions of his many plays.
Haynes (who worked at the Royal Court Theatre in London when Beckett was directing his own plays) worked on this book’s photography, while Knowlson contributes three penetrating essays on the Dublin-born playwright. Knowlson is a particularly knowledgeable writer, having been a friend to Beckett, and later a biographer.
This book may be more for devoted Beckett fans. Still, it offers a fresh look at a writer about whom much has already been written. ($30 / 159 pages / Cambridge University Press)
Maura Moynihan’s interests have reached as far and wide as her father’s, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She is a designer and an award-winning musician. Her clothing line is now being sold through Saks Fifth Avenue. She has lived in New York City, as well as India, Washington, D.C., Kathmandu and Nepal. She has been a human rights activist and worked on many of her father’s political campaigns.
But she has always wanted, above all, to be a writer. (In interviews, Moynihan plainly states that this is the result of her Irish upbringing, which placed a high value on the written word.)
It took a number of years, but Moynihan recently published a collection of stories in the U.S., and they have proven to be a hit.
In the 1970s, Moynihan moved to New Delhi with her mother and father, who at the time was U.S. ambassador to India. She was fascinated by the country’s contradictions: ancient religions amid urban chaos, the staggering disparity between rich and poor, and Indian familial tradition and the lure of Western modernity.
Three decades of observation in India became the inspiration for Yoga Hotel. In Moynihan’s stories, British and American expatriates mingle with Indian friends, colleagues, and servants. In one story, Hari, a young Indian servant, hopes for a British boss’s help in escaping a prearranged marriage. In another, an American embassy worker discovers her married lover used her to get a visa.
These tales are both exotic and realistic, a tough balance to strike, but one which Moynihan has successfully pulled off. ($13.95 / 282 pages / Regan Books)
On the lighter side, the daughter of the Irish prime minister, Cecelia Ahern, will see her novel P.S. I Love You published in the U.S. in February. Promoted as The Notebook meets Bridget Jones’s Diary, Ahern’s novel is not exactly going to challenge most readers’ literary sensibilities. (The typical five-page chapter hints at this.) But P.S. I Love You is more or less an amiable page-turner about love, loss and recovery.
Ahern’s book follows Irish high-school sweethearts Holly and Gerry, who thought they had found the perfect mates in each other – until tragedy intrudes.
While mourning the loss of her lover, Holly finds “a list” Gerry left behind for her. This, as well as her girlfriends, family and career help Holly stumble towards a new life.
More Marian Keyes than Molly Bloom, P.S. I Love You is nevertheless garnering lots of attention. Publishing rights have been sold in over a dozen countries, and the producer of Forrest Gump has struck a movie deal. Nice to see Bertie’s 22-year-old daughter catch a break. ($21.95 / 384 pages / Hyperion)
For slightly more discriminating fiction devotees, John McGahern’s first novel The Barracks is finally being published in the U.S. Balancing tragedy and black comedy McGahern’s story revolves around Elizabeth Reegan, who after years of loneliness, gets married and settles into Irish village life. But Elizabeth’s husband (who has children from a previous marriage) is frustrated by his work as a police officer, and brings these woes home often.
As so often in McGahern’s later works, it is this kind of everyday difficulty which often seems both unbearable and unavoidable. ($14 / 232 pages / Penguin)
If Pete McCarthy seemed a bit odd to folks as he traveled the world in search of McCarthys, than imagine what the Irish locals made of Kevin O’Hara, after he decided to travel by donkey cart around the Irish countryside.
As eccentric as this sounds, the roots of what became O’Hara’s new memoir Last of the Donkey Pilgrims lay in pain and suffering.
At one point in his life, O’Hara found himself newly married to a beautiful woman. Yet he was full of rage. A Vietnam veteran, he was still haunted by the horrors of war. These memories threatened to tear his life apart.
In desperation, O’Hara went to Ireland seeking solace in the green fields, open skies, and presence of friends and relatives.
But it wasn’t until he plotted to travel the length and width of Ireland by donkey that O’Hara found the therapy he was looking for. Neighbors near O’Hara’s grandmother’s farmhouse predicted the odd American wouldn’t get far, much less circle the entire island of Ireland.
But Kevin, as well as Missy (that’s the donkey) were determined to complete the months-long 1,800-mile journey, and along the way, locate peace of mind for O’Hara. Last of the Donkey Pilgrims is, to say the least, a unique contribution to the vast field of Irish memoirs. ($25.95 / 400 pages / Forge Books)
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