A look at books - Irish history, fiction and biography to get your teeth in to

Vengeance 

By Benjamin Black

Benjamin Black is the pen name of award winning Irish novelist and Booker Prize winner John Banville, which means that the prose stylings of this impressively literary whodunit (and the focus on fully realized characters) are much finer than the genre usually affords.

Black/Banville assembles a cast of upscale but sulphurous Dubliners, including one of Ireland’s most successful – and, it turns out, suicidal -- businessmen, then he exposes the corrupt and corrupting world they live in where money and sex trump all other considerations. 

Detective Inspector Hackett and his pinstriped consultant pathologist sidekick Quirke find themselves pulled ever deeper into the mysterious case and into dangerous the orbit of Dublin’s elite. 

What Black/Banville does with particular facility is to create a climate of suspicion and dread that turns this surprisingly sordid tale into a page-turner of the highest order.

Picador, $16.

Murder, Mutiny and Mayhem: The Blackest Hearted Villains From Irish History

By Joe O’Shea

Who could resist a book with a title like this? 

Ireland’s produced some of the world’s greatest writers, so it stands to reason we’ve offered the world our fair share of epic blackguards too.

Luke Ryan, for example, lived a marvelously immoral life as a pirate, sailing under every flag and no flag, eventually redeeming himself a little by fighting for Benjamin Franklin in the American War of Independence.

But there are much darker chapters in this diverting book. Did you know that James “Sligo” Jameson, the heir to the whiskey empire, found only madness and cannibalism in the heart of Africa? 

A 19th century explorer, Jameson had started a principled man with the best of intentions, but the isolation, brutality and sickness of life in the Congo quickly turned him into something much darker. 

A gem in the rough is the wonderfully named Beauchamp Bagenal, whose good looks, short fuse and deadly skill with a pistol made him one of the most feared duelists in Europe. Born and raised in Co. Carlow, Bagenal eventually blazed his way his across Europe terrifying and delighting his observers in equal measure. 

This book lays his life, and those of other notable Irish rakes, out in a timely reminder that our gentle nation doesn’t always lay out a hundred thousand welcomes. 

Dufour, $21.95.

Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice

By Mary Robinson

It's impossible to overstate Mary Robinson’s political impact on the life of the nation. Ireland’s first woman president, a tireless advocate for the marginalized and the forgotten (and a principled lifelong trailblazer), sometimes single-handedly she ushered the nation toward modernity. 

Human rights, women’s rights, and gay rights -- she pursued them all, even when it was neither popular nor profitable.  Her passion for social justice and her awareness that equality had to include everyone or it wasn’t worthy of the name pitted her against some of Ireland’s most conservative politicians. 

As her new book makes clear, those who were taken in by her mild manner soon found themselves astonished by her tenacity and courage. Even the notorious Irish Prime Minister Charles J. Haughey was galled to find himself easily bested by her over her constitutional mandate. 

Robinson was a constitutional lawyer, and there wasn’t a politician in Ireland, male or female, who was her match. 

Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice reminds us of the accomplishments of this extraordinary figurehead, but it also allows us to hear a little about the personal cost of such a spirited public life.

Walker, $26.

Almost Home: Helping Kids Move From Homelessness to Hope

By Kevin Ryan and Tina Kelley

It isn’t just strangers who can be bullies, sadly. Sometimes your own parents or siblings can be more of a threat to your future happiness than anyone you’ll encounter on the streets.

Family violence, sexual abuse, teen parenthood, prostitution, gay kids rejected for their sexual orientation -- the list of home wrecking possibilities is seemingly limitless, and once it starts it often veers into tragedy or flight. 

Those are among the main reasons why every year 1.6 million American teenagers become homeless. Their problems only start there. Trading in one identity for another can be a powerfully disorientating experience, sending many into a tale spin from which they never recover. Five minutes ago you were a teenager, minutes later you’re just a nameless street-walking statistic waiting to happen. 

Almost Home tells the story of one brave organization that dares to stand in the way of the inevitable. Covenant House is the largest charity serving homeless, trafficked and runaway youth in America. 

And in their new book, Irish American president Kevin Ryan and journalist Tina Kelley tell the story of their involvement with the organization, including some of the most illustrative and striking stories of the many teens they have met – and saved – from lonely fates. 

Wiley, $16.95.

Reviews by Irish Voice Arts Editor Cahir O'Doherty

Girls just wanna have fun - preview of 'For Love' at the Irish Rep, New York

John Duddy and Laoisa Sexton in For Love.

There are countless Irish plays about the national question. There are drama libraries stacked with Irish plays about emigration and return.

There are seemingly endless numbers of Irish plays that present quaint rustics being cruel to each other. We even have a new body of supernatural Irish tales.

But there are very few Irish plays that contemplate love and sex, their temptations and complications, that that are written by a woman or with a woman’s perspective, for some reason.

It’s a curious thing. It’s not as if Irish women don’t have opinions on the matter.

Take Irish actress and playwright Laoisa Sexton. It’s safe to assume the actress got so tired waiting for Irish roles she could strongly identify with that she decided to write them herself. Generations of Irish actresses have been forced to do likewise, in the process often creating some of the best theater companies in the nation.

But Sexton didn’t set out to start a revolution. She just wanted to encounter roles she could identify with and believe in.

In For Love, her new play opening at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York this week, Sexton has done something so simple and yet revolutionary that you can’t fail to appreciate it -- she has fashioned living and breathing Irish women from the experience of being one herself.

Sounds straightforward in theory, but it’s really not. Plays from Ireland that don’t feature Aran Island dwelling yokels who do be expressing themselves in the heighted parlance of the whest aren’t as generally popular as plays that do.

It turns out that the world, or at least American theater-going audiences, believe it’s still 1904 in Ireland and that indoor plumbing is a terrible novelty altogether, begod.

If you don’t live like this, if you prefer to go shopping and are interested in fashion and music and contemporary art say, you’re not going to find much among contemporary Irish playwrights to latch on to.

That’s what makes For Love such a singular play. It leaps to life from the lived experience of contemporary Dublin women, and it speaks in their vernacular about the issues that actually absorb them.

It will be interesting to see what New York audiences (and critics) make of Sexton’s hilarious and absorbing drama. I suspect they’ll be surprised by its modernity, and probably challenged by it to.

The thing about contemporary Irish drama written by men is that, like Irish men themselves, they tend to do most of the thinking for you.

In contrast, Sexton seems more interested in exploring the unintended consequences of actions that reveal character. Her women are brittle, smart, hard-bitten and ready to laugh or cry in a heartbeat.

These women are romantic realists, aware of their contradictions and reveling in them. They’re not the enskied and sainted paragons of Irish nationalist drama, they’re not the terrifying harridans of Irish rural farce, they’re living breathing Dublin women whose wit and wisdom could cut the heels of you. And they want a drink and a dance, now.

The questions For Love asks are as old as the world. Is there more than a one night stand in Val’s future? Can the right dress take Tina’s mind off the wrong man? Is Bee falling herself falling for a married man that feeds her lines and he reels her in on one?

For Love does something else that the boys forget to include in their dramas. It explores female friendship, the tensions, petty jealousies and the immense affection that guide them in a way that feels so fresh you’ll realize how much they’ve been missing in Irish drama.

What would you do for love, the play asks? The answer, of course, is just about anything.

That’s a perspective that isn’t clouded by the national question or the tensions of modernism versus the parochial or any of that navel gazing malarkey. These girls just wanna have fun, and when the fun is over, they want someone to come home to.

They want what we all want. It’s just amazing to see that awareness being presented in a modern Irish play.

The Irish Repertory Theatre, and 1st Irish Theatre Festival where the play originally debuted, are both to be thanked for taking a chance on a drama that isn’t at all typical of the work coming out of Ireland. They are also to be commended for knowing it deserves to be seen.

For tickets to For Love visit www.irishrep.org.

A look at Irish books for St. Patrick’s Day - heroes, villains and other characters

The Origins of the Irish
By J.P. Mallory

About 80 million people trace their origins to Ireland.  The question that hasn’t really been asked in nearly 80 years is how did the Irish people come into being themselves?

Employing the varied disciplines of archeology, genetics, geology, linguistics and mythology, the author traces the disparate influences that shaped the Irish people and their language.

Mallory carefully evaluates the reasons why the earliest colonists decided to settle in a fairly inhospitable land that at the time offered little enough to farmers, and he traces their impact on the island, which he calls monumental. What really brought the emerging nation to the attention of early Europe was the work of metallurgists in copper, bronze and iron, he argues.

Relatively recent scientific advances in genetics are complicating rather than explaining the origins of the Irish people themselves, however. But Mallory’s immensely scholarly study offers every kind of explanation, and the reader is left with multiple absorbing possible answers.

Thames & Hudson, $29.95.

The Cold Case Files: On the Trail of Ireland’s Undetected Killers
By Barry Cummins

Unsolved murders often haunt the lives of those left behind, but thanks to books like this one the uncaught killers will never be allowed to rest easy.

One of Ireland’s most respected crime journalists, Barry Cummins’s latest book charts five decades of unsolved killings in Ireland, including the 1981 shooting of Lorcan O’Byrne, tragically attacked by robbers on the night of his engagement.

Cummins also examines the case of Grace Livingstone, who was found shot dead in her Malahide, Co. Dublin home in 1992. Another unsolved case is the abduction and murder of Brooke Pickard, who was last seen in Co. Kerry in 1991.

These cases, shocking in themselves, remind us how many cold blooded killers still walk among us, hoping never to hear the dreaded knock that signals justice is about to be served.

The book ends with a case recently solved by the cold case unit, the murder and secret burial of Brian McGrath in Co. Westmeath in 1987. Justice may sometimes take slow steps Cummins writes, but with committed detectives like these on the case, its march is unstoppable.

Dufour, $26.95.

Jane W. Shackleton’s Ireland
Photographs Complied by Christiaan Corlett

Christiaan Corlett is an archeologist with the Irish National Monuments Service and has extensive knowledge of the early photography of Ireland. The nation should probably raise a monument to Corlett himself for producing this remarkable book.

In 1881 the photographer Jane Wingham Shackleton visited the Aran Islands and ended up recording how the islanders lived and dressed. She made eight more trips there over subsequent years, but her Victorian eye was also drawn to signs of emerging industries and the people who worked them.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Shackleton is particularly drawn to the people she photographs, giving her portraits an emotional heft often lacking in other works of this era.

That her subjects are Irish is unmistakable. These are the faces of our tribe, but these faces are long gone, as indeed are most of their grandchildren already. To open this book is to step into Irish history portraits that cannot fail to move and astonish you.

Dufour, $44.95.

Broken Promises: Whatever Happened to Vatican Council II?
By Finbarr M. Corr

After serving 28 years in the priesthood of the church he loves, Finbarr M. Corr knows about the inner workings of the Catholic hierarchy and has decades of pastoral experience of his own; both of these qualifications make him an ideal guide to the challenges facing the church in the 21 century.

Many of the church’s current crises can be traced to its refusal to enact the promises of the Vatican Council II 50 years after it was first convened, Corr contends in his new book Broken Promises: Whatever Happened to Vatican Council II?

In particular, the Vatican’s failure to embrace shared authority and openness has been disastrous, he argues. The author, who served as a priest before, during and after the council, explains why that there is still time for rescue and renewal of the church even though the most damaging result of the hierarchy's failed follow through – the cover up of sexual abuse of children by clergy – now threatens the church's very survival.

Trafford, $15.

Katie Taylor: Journey to Olympic Gold
By Jason O’Toole

Cometh the hour, cometh the woman. Just when Ireland (mired in financial crisis and hemorrhaging emigrants) desperately needed a hero, along came the unstoppable Irish boxer Katie Taylor.

Taylor made Olympic history by winning gold in London in 2012 (the ninth Olympic gold medal won by an Irish athlete since the foundation of the Republic), adding her to the all-time greatest list.

But it didn’t just happen overnight. O’Toole’s book charts Taylor’s ascent through the ranks of women’s boxing.

At 15 she was a trailblazer, participating in the first officially sanctioned women’s bout in Ireland. Soon after she became the first woman to win four successive world titles, followed by five European amateur championships and four European amateur titles.

But her road was always going to pass through the London Olympics last summer (via the delighted hearts of every Irish person who watched her at home and abroad).

This timely book reminds us that even the worst Irish summer in history couldn’t best her. The sun shone and the day turned out grand for the thousands who turned up for her homecoming, O’Toole reminds us.

Sometimes heroes do come when you call.

Dufour, $22.95.

Race and Immigration in the New Ireland
Edited by Julieann Veronica Ulin, Heather Edwards and Sean O’Brien

The Celtic Tiger boom and bust contained two different but equally valuable lessons for the nation -- if it has the honesty to see them.

One lesson is that we need not fear the more secular society that Ireland is becoming. The other lesson is that we need not throw away all the values and traditions of the past to achieve this.

The Irish know all about emigration, but little enough yet about immigration. It’s a conversation that should get started, and this scholarly and engaging book takes us through the social and political challenges and opportunities that immigration presents to us.

Notre Dame, $24.50.

The Magnificent Desolation
By Thomas O’Malley

Most children have rooms in their imagination that they can journey to in times of crisis or loss. So it is in O’Malley’s hypnotic new novel, which tells the tale of young Duncan Bright, a boy who wakes up at the age of 10 with only one memory -- that God had spoken to him when he was born.

O’Malley writes prose that’s clear as glass, and this story offers us all he knows about love and loss, which turns out to be a great deal. The Magnificent Desolation is a novel to shake you out of your torpor and see the world afresh through the transformative magic of a child’s imagination, an astonishingly creative feat in itself.

Bloomsbury, $26.

Dark Times, Decent Men: Stories Of Irishmen in World War Two
By Neil Richardson

Think of the evil of Nazism. In recent weeks it was revealed the Nazis opened over 42,000 camps across Europe, mostly to exploit and kill their enemies, which were legion.

The sheer darkness of that era can be hard to fathom, so it’s salutary to see that over 130,000 Irish men and women answered the call to fight the Nazis during World War II (7,500 of them never to return).

In Richardson’s book he gathers dramatic first hand accounts from Irishmen who went to war, fighting in Dunkirk and North Africa and on the D-Day beaches.

Irishmen were also RAF aces, they served as sailors in seas infested by U-boats, they served alongside the US 101 Airborne Division and some won Victoria Crosses for their heroism. Seen now, decades after their service, they look like heroes they were, not the traitors they were often accused of being.

Dufour, $29.95.

Always and 'Forever Dusty' Springfield - New York show tells tale of Irish Catholic schoolgirl turned legendary singer

Kirsten Holly Smith as Dusty
 Springfield in Forever Dusty.

Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien was one of the greatest soul singers of the 1960s and ‘70s. You’ve probably heard of her legendary stage name, Dusty Springfield, but did you know she was born a shy Irish Catholic schoolgirl?

Making your way through the heady atmosphere of Swinging Sixties London required talent (she had enough for several lifetimes), but it also required nerves of steel (and she found that the way many Irish people have, via the end of a vodka shot glass).

Being a woman in the male dominated music business was challenging enough, but her own inner struggles, which included a complex and competitive relationship with her talented brother and a series of discreet gay affairs at a time when they could have ended her career, all took their toll.

In Forever Dusty, now playing at New Word Stages at 340 50th Street in Manhattan, Springfield’s talent and troubled existence are restaged for an appreciative new generation in a show that the main player and co-writer Kirsten Holly Smith absolutely puts her heart and soul into.

“I’m a singer and that’s what led me to her,” Smith tells the Irish Voice. “Alongside her talent, which is incredible, her personal story is completely fascinating. She was this shy Irish schoolgirl called Mary O’Brien who would hide behind all the makeup and wigs that allowed her to become Dusty Springfield.

“People think they know her.  I thought I did, but then I discovered how rich her life was.”

One of things Springfield was, the show tells us, was a principled anti-racist. Against the wishes of her African American girlfriend at the time (played by the remarkably gifted stage performer Christina Sajous) Springfield naively took her show to Cape Town in South Africa, insisting on performing in cinemas, one of the few venues in the Apartheid state that permitted interracial attendees.

But even this proved too much for the authorities and she was placed under house arrest, with government goons insisting she sign a letter condemning her own actions. She refused and instantly became a hero to the back majority.

How have we not heard more about this inspirational Irish life, you will ask yourself as the play progresses?

Alongside Springfield’s deep humanity is the unforgettable music: “Son of a Preacher Man,” “You Don‘t Have to Say You Love Me,” “The Look of Love” – all of these can be found on her catalogue, and her critically celebrated album Dusty In Memphis is still the greatest enduring tribute to the famous Memphis sound.

The band in Forever Dusty is the show’s secret weapon. They rock out when they need to, but their soul grooves are completely irresistible. I defy anyone to attend this captivating musical drama and fail to be transported by the soul music that lifts this performance into the stratosphere.

Be warned, though, this is not a magic carpet ride. In her storied career Springfield endured enough challenges for several lifetimes.

Among the cast of villains are musical executives who were too free with their hands, bullying producers, a brother (played thoughtfully by Sean Patrick Hopkins) who wanted her to tailor her career to his wishes, and a girlfriend who loved her but not the challenges that came with her.

The one constant in Springfield’s career was her incredible voice. It never lost the ability to transcend every challenge that life threw her and audiences (particularly those in the know) adored for it.

The biggest challenge of her life was reconciling the shy Mary O’Brien to the fabulous Dusty Springfield. The former never felt good enough to be the latter. The greatest struggle of Springfield’s life was to unite the two strands of her private and public identity and come to accept herself.

“She was a Catholic girl and she was gay and I think her religion contributed to her negative feelings about herself throughout her life. She became self-destructive and that came from somewhere, you know?” says Smith, who was raised Catholic herself before converting to Judaism.

One detail of Forever Dusty is particularly moving for Irish viewers. Toward the end of her life when she was suffering from breast cancer, Springfield insisted on returning “home” to Ireland.  Later, after she passed her brother scattered her ashes along the Cliffs of Moher, her favorite place in the world, Smith says.

“That’s how Irish she was. This legendary singer wanted to come home to Ireland,” Smith says.
For tickets call 212-239-6200 or visit www.newworldstages.com.

Tony winner Katie Finneran steals show in Annie on Broadway

Katie Finneran (Miss Hannigan) teaches Lila Crawford (Annie) it's a hard knock life.

Katie Finneran, 42, is the Tony Award-winning actress currently wowing audiences with her barnstormer performance as Miss Hannigan, the so-bad-she’s-good orphanage supervisor in the Broadway revival of the classic musical Annie.

It’s a somewhat unlikely role for the Miami-born Irish American actress, whose previous Broadway hits include her unforgettable Tony winning turn as a been around the block barfly opposite Sean Hayes in the musical Promises, Promises. 

Although Finneran is blessed with leading lady looks, in recent years her comic talent has opened doors toward the kind of classic Broadway roles once played by theatrical luminaries like Carol Burnett and Kathy Bates. It turns out that no one is more surprised by this unexpected career development than Finneran herself.

Having been called by the producers to audition for the part of Miss Hannigan, the plum role in Annie, Finneran wondered what on earth they were expecting.

“I was really hesitant,” she confesses to the Irish Voice. “I asked myself, what am I going to bring to this role that the great Carol Burnett, the great Kathy Bates haven’t already offered? But it’s also a great job and a very juicy part, and if they were willing to give me a shot at it I was willing to take a risk and do it.”

Thank goodness for her courage. Finneran, often singing and speaking in her lower octaves, gives her tough as nails character as much reality as she can, and it turns out she’s the best thing about this otherwise relentlessly sweet slice of American pie.

Annie the musical is based on the Little Orphan Annie cartoon strip of the 1920s and ‘30s that gradually became a kind of spiritual pick-me-up for the hard-bitten Depression-era generation facing into profound economic uncertainty.

Annie then -- and now -- offered wish fulfillment and the hope of a sunnier tomorrow that proved irresistible. After all, if a plucky young orphan girl could make good in this crazy world, what’s stopping you? As long as you have a song in your heart and a smile on your face, that is.

“We have to remember that the show is written to appeal to children and it can’t get so dark that it isn’t accessible to them,” says Finneran wisely.

“But it does have a lot of dark themes. I really appreciated director James Lapine’s approach to the reality of the time the cartoon was written in. It’s meant to be light and fun and uplift people but it was dealing with really hard times. Every time I hear a four year old giggle I remember that that’s who we’re doing the show for.”

Finneran’s performance anchors Annie from her opening scene, preventing the show from becoming much too saccharine, as her scenes remind us that when dreams come true for one person they often fall apart for someone else.

Confessing she used to listen to the original Broadway recording of Annie when she was a little girl, she never imagined she’d step into her role. “It was a dream come true to actually be in the show, especially on Broadway.” But it wasn’t a dream she’d nurtured.

“I was very shocked to be asked to be in this show,” she says plainly. “I had just played a role of a character who was very bawdy in Promises, Promises.  That had sort of allowed people to see me as a potential Miss Hannigan.

“But I was a lot younger than she is usually played. When I met with the producers I was seven and a half months pregnant. I remember it vividly. I sang the Little Girls song wearing a Diane Von Furstenberg gown and high heels and somehow I won them over. Very odd, but I guess it worked.”

Finneran, who despite having unbroken Irish ancestry on both sides has not yet visited Ireland, reveals that she has become particularly interested in her Irish ancestry in recent years and has decided to begin a search.

“I always lie and say my people come from Cork, but I don’t really know. I told my husband I want to do it. I want to research our ancestry now, so we’re starting,” she said.

Meanwhile fans hoping to catch Finneran as Miss Hannigan will need to book before May 16, when Glee’s Jane Lynch (another Irish American) is scheduled to take over the role.

There’s a good reason for Finneran’s departure. It has just been announced she will co-star alongside Michael J. Fox in the forthcoming NBC comedy The Hollywood Reporter.

Fox will play Mike Burnaby, a former news anchor who decides to return to work after Parkinson’s forced him to take some time off. Finneran will play Leigh, his self-involved younger sister who is jobless and clueless and doing whatever she can to stay young.

It’s the kind of role Finneran can play with her eyes closed, so expect fireworks. In the meantime, though, she’s reminding Broadway what a Tony winner looks like.

Catch her before the curtain falls, because Annie knows how to bring the sunshine.

Annie is playing at the Palace Theatre, 1564 Broadway. For tickets and showtimes visit www.anniethemusical.com.