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We Don't Know Ourselves
A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958
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Description
The #1 Irish Times bestseller
WINNER of the An Post Irish Book Awards
'A clear-eyed, myth-dispelling masterpiece' Marian Keyes
'Sweeping, authoritative and profoundly intelligent' Colm Tóibín, Guardian
'With the pace and twists of an enthralling novel' Irish Times
'Evocative, moving, funny and furious' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
'An enthralling, panoramic book' Patrick Radden Keefe
'A book that will remain important for a very long time' An Post Irish Book Award
We Don't Know Ourselves is a very personal vision of recent Irish history from the year of O'Toole's birth, 1958, down to the present. Ireland has changed almost out of recognition during those decades, and Fintan O'Toole's life coincides with that arc of transformation. The book is a brilliant interweaving of memories (though this is emphatically not a memoir) and engrossing social and historical narrative. This was the era of Eamon de Valera, Jack Lynch, Charles Haughey and John Charles McQuaid, of sectarian civil war in the North and the Pope's triumphant visit in 1979, but also of those who began to speak out against the ruling consensus – feminists, advocates for the rights of children, gay men and women coming out of the shadows. We Don't Know Ourselves is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand modern Ireland.
Accessibility Information
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- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
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Product details
| Published | 30 Sep 2021 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 624 |
| ISBN | 9781784978280 |
| Imprint | Apollo |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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A clear-eyed, myth-dispelling masterpiece. Engaging, analytical, insightful, fascinating, this is a hugely important book. Rooting the politics in the personal makes a potentially overwhelming read into a book that reads as easily as a novel
Marian Keyes
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While his sweeping, authoritative and profoundly intelligent book sees modern Ireland through the lens of his own life and that of his family, it also offers sharp and brilliant analysis of what form change took when it arrived in Ireland
Colm Tóibín, Guardian
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Scintillating... Combines personal with political on a journey to the heart of Irish identity'
Business Post
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A remarkably original, fluent and absorbing book, with the pace and twists of an enthralling novel and the edge of a fine sword, underpinned by a profound humaneness
Diarmaid Ferriter, Irish Times
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Our leading public intellectual has written the bible on incorrigible Irish roguery
Irish Independent
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Fintan is now routinely described as 'Ireland's leading public intellectual'... If we must have a hegemony, the best by a long way is the liberal kind. And to know how it happened here, this is the bible'
Sunday Independent

























