Roald Dahl's Matilda battles bullies on Broadway

Bertie Carvel steals scenes and carries the show.

The truth is Matilda isn't one of Roald Dahl's most interesting works. Oh, it's a charming and typically dark effort by the old master and you'll certainly find yourself rooting for his bright and put-upon young creation, but there are contradictions in the narrative that make you wonder why it takes the time it takes for the story to end happily.

That's not the case with the Royal Shakespeare Company's absurdly entertaining new musical Matilda based on Dahl's book, now playing on Broadway.

This high octane production, which features choreography that's sometimes so athletically over the top it's a little exhausting to witness, manages to do the near impossible and outfit the slim story line with songs and dance routines that add immeasurably to the source material.

With it's theme of the imaginations power to push back against the ugly realities of life, and the power of books to transform any existence, you'll cheer as smart as a whip little Matilda learns to push back against the bully who wants to boss her around.

As Miss Trunchbull, actor Bertie Carvel inhabits the role of the headmistress from Hell so successfully you might as well award him a Tony right now (it's all but inevitable). His grotesque makeup, his hunched back, his shuffling walk and his vocal stylings are captivatingly sinister and unspeakably funny.

The four young American actresses who alternate in the title role have all successfully mastered their British accents, but in the first act their projection occasionally faltered in certain songs. But these are the teething troubles of a new production, the over all performance never misses a note.

Try to book your tickets now because they're going to become sought after. This show delivers the best new musical on Broadway since The Book of Mormon broke the bank.

A look at Irish books - from comedy and Typhoid Mary to history and more

Wacky Eire
By Geraldine Comiskey

Ireland is the acknowledged home of surrealism and Geraldine Comiskey (a roving reporter for the Sunday World) often has occasion to encounter it at its source. 

Having a journalistic resume that includes getting set on fire by stuntmen, dancing on the wings of a World War II bi-plane (well, who hasn’t?) and joining a circus trapeze troupe, she’s clearly ready for anything.

Ireland in Comiskey’s book is a magical place where all manner of weirdness awaits you down almost very boreen, so in a way her job is an ideal one, scouring the nation in search of fun.

Her book is an eye-popping procession of dodgy faith healers, rural swingers, ghost hunters, GAA players, all of Irish life really. Gifted with a never say die spirit and an uncanny ability to find herself at the center of the wackiest stories, she’s an ideal guide to the books theme and this is one of the moist singular books of its kind you’re ever likely to read about its subject.

Dufour, $22.95.

Fever

Mary Mallon was called a lot of things in her time, but she is known best to history as Typhoid Mary. It was an unfortunate moniker for the poor Irish immigrant woman who had traveled on her own to a new life in America, where she was to discover many new things about herself. Among the most employable discoveries she made was her remarkable talent for cooking.

In Mary Beth Keane’s new novel, Mallon’s life is imaginatively recreated in an act that seems determined to rescue her demonized subject from history. The writer looks behind the headlines to the individual life and the struggles Mallon contended with.

Working as a cook in upper class kitchens, Mallon unwittingly infected multiple people with typhoid, which eventually led to the discovery that there could be such a thing as an “asymptomatic carrier” (a person who carried the disease without becoming infected with it).

In order to contain an outbreak, Mallon was sent by the Department of Health to North Border Island, where she was held in quarantine from 1907 to 1910.

Along the way she became a legend, and this book seeks to rescue her from the headlines by reminding us that she was also a person, not simply a carrier of disease. Keane has crafted a remarkable narrative from a fascinating and ultimately heartbreaking tale.

Scribner, $26.

Lola’s Secret
By Monica McInerney

If you have grown up in a feuding family (and if you’re Irish that more of a certainty than not) the last thing you’d want is for some do-gooder relative to concoct stratagems to bring you and your warring relations to the same table.

But in Lola’s Secret, by bestselling Dublin based author Monica McInerney, the heroine can’t help herself. At 84 she’s still determined to exercise her talent for creating truces among long battling families.

Her latest scheme involves inviting a number of mystery guests to stay at a local hotel – guests who have their reasons not to spend Christmas with their loved ones.

If this sounds contrived, well it is, but it is also effective too. And the woman who breaks her heart to make everything right for other people discovers that she’s not above experiencing a little healing of her own. McInerney’s addresses the occasional stuckness and the obstinance of family dynamics and she reveals just how much can change for better with a little push.

Ballantine, $15.

Smashing H-Block
By F. Stuart Ross

H-Block. Even the name is like a talisman that takes you right back to the darkest days of The Troubles in the North. In F. Stuart Ross’s study he offers a political history of the Irish Republican struggle against criminalization from 1976 to 1982.

These men were not terrorists. They were soldiers defying an occupation, and their struggle eventually culminated in the hunger strikes that were a turning point in the long war.

Ross insists that it was not just the prisoners themselves but also the wider activism of the grassroots movement outside the prisons that reshaped the Republican struggle and revitalized its ambitions.

Ross is a Derry based academic who reminds us that through their political activism ordinary people, the friends and relations of those “inside” had a profound effect on the emerging political consensus that was built during the darkest years of The Troubles and would change the debate thereafter.

University of Chicago Press, $34.95.

Irish playwright Jimmy Kerr's House Strictly Private was a standout of the recent First Irish Theatre Festival

Irish playwright Jimmy Kerr

Two Irish playwrights emerged from the recent 1st Irish Theatre Festival in New York, and it's time to mark their achievements. Playwright Jimmy Kerr is already well known to the Irish community here for his successful run of Ardnaglass on the Air, a knockabout rural comedy which played at the Manhattan Theatre Source in 2010, directed by actress Geraldine Hughes.

But House Strictly Private, a pitch-black comic drama, is an unexpected follow up to Kerr's rollicking festival debut. Tackling the subject of an Irish wake, the play at first unfolds with deceptive simplicity. Kerr introduces us to the McCracken family, who have gathered on the death of their uncle, whose early passing has not been anticipated. Coming together for the first time in years, they must confront the past and what it has made of them.

Kerr is a northern playwright and so he has an engaged sense of just how thorny and intractable the past can be, and how hard it can be to create a shared future when confronted with truths that can seem insurmountable. He certainly doesn't make it easy on his characters, whose lives and choices are revealed in panels that add dimension and layer to this uniquely thoughtful drama.

How am I going to live now? That's the question that hunts each of the blasted survivors of the destructive hurricane that was their uncle's life.

It's a hard question for a play that includes genuinely comic moments, and yet Kerr manages to wield the material with real skill. In particular he's good at offsetting your expectations with revelations that take you in directions you never anticipated.

Betrayal and how to contend with it is at the heart of House Strictly Private. Whether it's betrayal in love, or the way parents can betray their offspring, or the way society can betray its most vulnerable to the wrath of the strong, what engages the playwright is how long injustice can leave a legacy before the courage or the resolve is found to start again.

Although abuse is the theme that ties the generations together here, stepping out from its shadow is the unexpected option that makes this play both timely and indisputably Irish. Even the most broken family can cobble together a future from the glass shards of the past.

Kerr's characters are remarkable in their desire to live and their desire to heal. He also reminds us that nothing is funnier than suffering, and that if you can stand it -- and you should try to stand it -- a day will come when you may think so yourself.

The savagery that is unleashed on his characters when they're least equipped to withstand it finds its match in their determination to move beyond it. I have rarely seen the North's determination to contend with its past and find its future so memorably and movingly portrayed on a stage.

For Love, by debut playwright Laoisa Sexton, is the most impressive first play I have seen in two decades. Featuring a flawless cast that included the writer herself, the play took us on a whirlwind tour of contemporary Dublin seen from a young woman's perspective in a way that was so authentic and casually funny that it disarmed you from the first scene.

Sexton writes with humor and real passion about the actual lives of young women, crafting dispatches from the trenches that tell it like it happens, and you realize as you’re watching it just how unusual that is in the all-too male dominated craft of Irish playwriting.

Sexton's writing is highly crafted, smart but straight from life and it frees her actors up to give arrestingly rich performances, which they do. Jo Kinsella, Georgina McKevitt, John Duddy and the playwright herself are pitch perfect from start to finish, owning the language like they own the play.

McKevitt is particularly funny in her underplayed and subtle characterization of a bored housewife redeemed by shopping. Kinsella is a revelation as a good time girl who suspects the good times are coming to an end, and she finds both the scalding ironies and the unforgettable gags lurking in each scene so expertly that she had the audience applauding her mid speech. Both these actresses bring lived experience to the stage and enrich the show with them.

Sexton conveys a nervy defensiveness and vulnerability on stage that makes her impossible to look away from. Playing a character who has had her heart broken so completely that she holds everyone and everything at a remove, Sexton's female characters are the most interesting and most recognizably Irish I have seen on an Irish stage in years.

The 1st Irish Theatre Festival deserves accolades for bringing these talents to an American stage, and Irish drama has been enriched by their appearance.

Look at books - Irish artists, fiction and history

Prodigals And Geniuses

By Brendan Lynch

The Irish love a good pub within walking reach and Ireland’s most gifted artists and thinkers have been no exception. As Paris has it’s Left Bank and New York has its Upper West Side, for decades Dublin’s bohemian quarter has been centered around Baggot Street and Leeson Street, fringed by the Grand Canal.

Among it’s familiars were four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature and nearly every major Irish writer of the 19 century, including Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and even Samuel Beckett.

Along the way Lynch conjures long lost Dublin like a magician. He never forgets how proud the capital city is of its distinguished writers and he never forgets how disdainfully it usually treated them when they actually lived there.

Lynch clearly loves his subjects and this is no more apparent than when he disccuses playwright Brendan Behan. “We’ve a lot to thank the British for,” Behan tells the author one morning in Dublin in 1958. “Did you ever see such handsome houses or squares? As my bardic neighbor John Montague might say, you can feel the rhythm. Look at those railings. And the granite steps dancing in the sun, wouldn’t they make your granny skip?”

Love for the locality and the mad collection of intellectuals, chancers and hangers on that assembled there once, and still assemble there now, animates every page of this deeply affectionate, brilliant and brilliantly gossipy book.

Dufour Editions, $31.95.

Cold Eye Of Heaven

By Christine Dwyer Hickey

In novelist Christine Dwyer Hickey’s new book we meet 75-year-old Dubliner Farley, an old man at the close of his days reflecting over the events that shaped him.

It’s quite a trick to peel away the layers of experience to dig to the root of her subject and reveal what makes him tick, but Dwyer Hickey is equal to it. Along the way she recreates a vanished Dublin, it’s sights and sounds and it’s magical vernacular, in a conjuring trick that will beguile you from the first page. (Christine Dwyer Hickey will read from and sign copies of Cold Eye Of Heaven at The Irish Arts Center at 7:30 PM on Tuesday, September 24).

It’s instructive to watch how regret can grow and take over a life until it’s all that remains of a person, and Dwyer Hickey shows us how loneliness can be the outcome of a poor choice, and one that spreads around a life like fog.

Dwyer Hickey also has the skill to take her time, offering a leisurely portrait of a man in lyrical prose that creates his world and his legacy so vividly you’ll think that all that separates you from him is a page. This is ambitious work, elegantly crafted.

Atlantic Books, $7.99.

Overcoming Violence

By Johnston McMaster

Ireland’s history, even in recent times, has been ferociously violent. Over centuries a cycle of outrage and revenge has characterized the seemingly endless conflict between warring traditions intent on giving no quarter.

What to do in a stalemate that cannot ever be won? And what of Christianity, that promotes peace but has shown itself to be all to quick to add kindling to long simmering resentments? Those questions have exercised minds for centuries.

In Overcoming Violence author McMaster explores the roots of the sectarian violence in Ireland, wresting the message of compassion and love from the destructive theology of the Old Testament.

In particular he laments the Irish myth of redemptive violence, which was all too popular with both sides in the Easter Rising and the Irish Civil war. Nothing good comes from anger and insult and McMaster wants to reminds us of the fact. Bad theology cannot be an excuse for more violence.

So what is strong enough to take the place of a culture of violence centuries in the making? A new value system, McMaster argues, and a new ethics based on non-violence that includes peace and compassion. We don’t just need to demilitarize our society; we need to do the same with our mindsets and spirituality.

Faith offers the most devastating critique of violence, and it can only work when it counters the violent theology and God that has been carefully but erroneously erected in Ireland over four centuries.
Columba Press, $26.95.

Origin Theatre to wow at 1st Irish festival for the fifth time in New York

Jo Kinsella in 'For Love'

It's time to give Origin Theatre its due, because its fifth annual New York festival dedicated to Irish playwrights (the only one in the world, as it happens) is running from September 3 to October 1 in New York.

For Origin it’s been a catalogue of successes because the company is celebrating its 10th anniversary season, and this year the month-long festival features Irish plays and musicals from 11 contemporary Irish playwrights (plus Eugene O’Neill) in productions from Belfast, Dublin, Boston and New York. 

Each of the main stage shows of the 1st Irish, as the festival is called, will be presented at well known venues in the city like the Irish Rep, 59E59, the Irish Arts Center, the Cell and the Drilling Company. 

“Five years and we’ve featured 72 Irish playwrights to date. It’s amazing isn’t it,” Origin’s artistic director George Heslin tells the Irish Voice.

“It’s year five so now we’re getting a huge amount of applications for the festival from Irish companies, so this year we have a broader scope. It’s not just theater -- it’s musicals and other aspects of theater. This year we’ll stage panel discussions and related events too.”

Right on cue to offer his services and his star power is Origin’s newest honorary patron, the Irish and British actor Brendan Coyle (Downton Abbey). Coyle joined the company in May and will appear during the festival to announce an upcoming 1st Irish project in New York.

The Cell on West 23rd Street will be the venue that hosts the premiere of Hard Times, a new musical written by Black 47 front man Larry Kirwan that juxtaposes Irish and African-American folk traditions. Hard Times will run from September 12 to 29.

Other highlights include For Love by the gifted writer, director and performer Laoisa Sexton. It’s a play about three women navigating the choppy waters of Dublin nightlife. The play will have its world premiere at the Drilling Co. and run from September 25 to 30.

New York’s Double Decker Productions will present New York-based playwright Jimmy Kerr’s House Strictly Private, a dark comedy by this searingly funny writer set in rural Northern Ireland, at the Drilling Co. from September 26 to 30.

The Irish Arts Center will present the U.S. premiere of writer and performer (and Irish national treasure) Pat Kinevane’s Silent, one of the most talked-about shows in recent years. Produced by Ireland’s preeminent contemporary playwright theater company Fishamble, the Edinburgh Fringe winner arrives direct from its sold-out run at the Abbey and will play from September 6 to 23.

In another headline show, the critically acclaimed production of Marie Jones’ hilarious comedy Fly Me to the Moon will have its U.S. premiere at 59E59, and run from September 5 to 30. 

Alongside the plays there will be panel events that will include a night called Damn Yeats, We’ll Write Our Own Plays, which will be a guided conversation featuring 1st Irish artists about the unique perspectives, traditions and characters of Northern Ireland’s theatre scene dating back to the early 20th century. 

The talk will be hosted by NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House, which is located at 1 Washington Mews off lower Fifth Avenue, on Thursday September 6 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Another new aspect of the growing festival is an event titled 1st Irish on Film, from Stage to Screen, a new series that explores the challenges of adapting plays to film. 

Hosted by the New York Irish Center in association with the Irish Rep, the special event features the Irish Rep’s award-wining Ciaran O’Reilly, who will perform solo excerpts from Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa before introducing a screening of the 1998 film version starring Meryl Streep and Michael Gambon. The performance and screening will happen on September 7 and 21, both at 7:30 p.m.

There will also be a reading by author Tony Macaulay from his best-selling memoir Paperboy about growing up in West Belfast in the 1970s, hosted by the W.B. Yeats Society at the National Arts Club on September 17 at 6 p.m.

And for one night only there will be a special performance of celebrated Irish actor Garrett Keogh’s play Setanta Murphy, a drama that addresses themes of life and death, which will be presented by American Irish Historical Society in association with Origin Theatre Company on Tuesday September 11 at 7 p.m.

Visit www.1stIrish.org.

A look at books - Irish gems of short stories, novels and history

The Colours of Man
By Micheal O’Conghaile


Michael O’Conghaile is already a famous short story writer in the Irish language, but this new collection of his most celebrated works translated into English will introduce him to a larger (and I am certain appreciative) new audience.

A typical offering in this brilliantly funny collection of short stories is Death at a Funeral, where O’Conghaile illustrates just why he’s widely revered as an Irish language author. O’Conghaile’s works illustrate what the poet W.B. Yeats called the Irish preference for a swift current in both language and human interaction.

Just look at these opening lines and marvel at their economy and wit: “It would have been ridiculous for Eamon Bartley to stay ensconced in his coffin any longer. He couldn’t anyway. He was far too good to have died.”

O’Conghaile can keep this kind of thing up without ever faltering, and that hilarious streak of black absurdity runs through his best works, disarming you with its sheer good humor and smarts. But for all their surface dazzle, these are deceptively subtle works with quietly subversive intentions.

Possessing an insider’s knowledge of the rhythms of Irish rural life as he simultaneously satirizes them with an outsiders remove, O’Conghaile is one of the most interesting and prodigiously gifted Irish writers I have read in years.

Clo Iar-Chonnacht, $19.

The Absolutist
By John Boyne

Irish novelist John Boyne is already an Irish publishing phenomenon.  Best known for the hauntingly sad New York Times bestselling novel (and then film) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, his new offering The Absolutist is his most satisfying and affecting novel to date.

Set in September 1919, Boyne introduces us to shell shocked 21-year-old Tristan Sadler, who has just taken a train from London to Norwich to deliver a package of letters to the sister of Will Bancroft, the young man who was his friend (and whom he fought alongside) during the Great War.

But Tristan has secrets, and it turns out the letters are not the real reason for his visit. Breaking down, he tells Will’s sister the true story of his friendship with her brother -- from their first meeting on the army training grounds at Aldershot to the wrenching finale in the trenches of northern France.

Boyne’s control of his material is masterful as he leads us into the smoking no-man’s-land of his hero’s scorched heart and soul.

Betrayal, jealously, pride and the stubborn refusal to embrace what you know will save you are all on display in this tragic and powerfully affecting new Irish novel.

Other Press, $16.95

Where Were You: Dublin Youth Culture & Street Style 1950-2000
By Garry O’Neill

Ravers, emos, goths, rockers, punks, new romantics, mods, skinheads, teddy boys -- depending what decade, Dublin knew them all.

Non-conformity has always had its own dress code, and now at last it has its own judicious chronicler in author Garry O’Neill (who for the record was once a member of one the most exalted underground youth groups of the last century – he was a teenage fan of The Smiths at their peak).

Beginning in 1950, O’Neill has carefully plundered the photo collections of hundreds of Dublin’s former scenesters to create this mammoth, funny and often moving tribute to the twin passions of pop music and street style.

Where Were You doesn’t intend to wallow in nostalgia, although it certainly invokes street styles and attitudes that are long gone. Instead it’s a vivid document of the hopes and aspirations of five generations of Dublin street culture.

Teddy boys are photographed in the grim Dublin landscape of the fifties. The loose-limbed swingers and hippies of the sixties stand in sharp and challenging contrast to the homespun city they parade through.

The seventies are commonly thought of as a lost decade for fashion, but the arresting diversity of style on the streets in those years shines through clearly in O’Neill’s fascinating book. The seventies scene begins with hippie relics and their voluminous flares, but it ends up with skinheads and punks and rockers revitalizing Dublin club land and music.

The eighties, one of the darkest economic decades in recent Irish history, still somehow manages to offer the widest range of alternative scenes in the last five decades, and O’Neill’s book captures the new romantics, the gender benders, the goths, the rockabillys and the newly emerging club kids who would lead the street style into the final decade of the 20th century.

O’Neill’s book is more than simply a record of the styles of each era. He has captured the hopes and dreams of 50 years of Irish teenage life. This book is a must have for anyone who grew up in Ireland between 1950 and 2000.

Hi Tone Books, $40.

Mary Deady’s American songbook at the West Bank Cafe

Mary Deady

Some singers are so good you can literally hear how much a song means to them as they perform it. It doesn’t happen very often, but it did last week at the West Bank Cafe on 42nd Street as Irish singer Mary Deady unveiled her latest musical journey at the Broadway hotspot.

A familiar face on the Irish scene in the city, it felt as though we were being collectively re-introduced to her since she is perhaps best known for singing Irish music. For many, including myself, this was our first introduction to her as a singer of the American songbook.

Aided by the utterly flawless musicianship of pianist and musical director Jeff Cubeta, Deady’s show From Ireland to America: A Musical Journey In Song was a marvel from the opening number.

It was Deady’s good fortune to be born in Co. Kerry, holy ground for generations of world-class singers and musicians. There she learned to play the harp, and later she left for Dublin for classically trained singing lessons that would eventually take her far from home on the musical journey that was her own life.

Deady chose songs that conveyed the immigrant love (and sometimes secret pining for) the homeland, and this she did as well as I have ever had the good fortune to hear. But the show has wider ambitions than merely relying on all too easy sentiment. Deady has a compelling tale to tell, and that is part of what takes this performance to the next level.

What I did not anticipate was being so moved by the deep connections between her life and the music that she took ownership of, each time from the first note.

Deady also sang songs in praise of the fairly demonic energy of New York City itself, and her version of the 1930 Cole Porter classic I Happen to Like New York seemed to conjure the whole damn city in a tribute that delighted the hard bitten New Yorkers in her audience. Believe me, that takes some skill.

“Last Sunday afternoon I took a trip to Hackensack,” she sang. “But after I gave Hackensack the once over, I took the next train back. I happen to like New York. I happen to love this burg.”

You know you’re deeply connecting when your audience is applauding you wildly before you’ve even reached the final chorus. That happened many times during Deady’s performance, and it’s a tribute to her skill as a singer that she could switch between the conflicting demands of the American songbook with its changes of mood and melody so nimbly.

You can’t sing a Stephen Sondheim song until you lived it first, and you can’t match his phrasing until you know exactly what he means. When you do, though, you can nail an audience to the wall with sincerity, experience, yearning and smarts that are his hallmark, and Deady did this so effortlessly that I found myself hoping selfishly she will consider offering an exclusively Sondheim evening in the near future.

In particular Deady’s rendition of “No One Is Alone,” culled from Sondheim’s masterful musical Into the Woods, found its emotional mark, conveying both rueful experience and the wisdom that it brings in the same note.

“Anyone Can Whistle” did likewise, but her version of “Not While I’m Around” from Sweeney Todd, which on the night she dedicated to her daughter, was so heartfelt and so carefully conveyed that it became one of the high water marks of the night.

There was fun to be had too. “Look to the Rainbow,” an irresistible number from the equally irresistible musical Finian’s Rainbow, lent some golden age of Broadway lyricism to the proceedings. In life as in song you won’t go too far wrong by following the fellow who follows a dream, and Deady made time for this reflection in her well-chosen set list.

I would have liked to have heard even more detail about her life and her relationship to the songs she sang on the night, but that was because Deady’s a natural storyteller, gifted with identifying the lessons of her own experience (and knowing how to have a laugh about them in the process). Hopefully that will be a feature of future productions.

Deady has travelled the world as the lead singer with the National Folk Theater of Ireland, but luckily for us she has found a home in New York City, where she has sung at signature venues throughout the city.
Knowing her audience on the night, Deady led a spirited encore of “Molly Malone,” and sent everyone home singing. What could be more Irish, or more delightful, than that?

A looks at books - Irish food and fiction

Call of the Lark
By Maura Mulligan

Maura Mulligan is perhaps best known to the Irish community in New York for her works as a dancer and actor at the Irish Arts Center, and as the founder of the Irish language school An Scoil Gaelige.

In Call of the Lark, her atmospheric and heartfelt new memoir, she conjures an Ireland and a way of life that may be as irretrievably lost to us now as Atlantis.

Starting life as a servant girl in a big house in Ireland, Mulligan sailed to America at the tender age of 17 where she soon answered a higher calling, entering a Franciscan convent to become a nun.
In the 1960s the reforms of Vatican II were only very slowly being implemented, and the preeminence of the Church in the life of the Irish was still paramount.

For Mulligan, a comely country girl with a reverence for God, church leaders were representatives of an authority that was never to be questioned. Her portrait of her own timidity in their presence is instructive, as is her slowly growing awareness that the life of a nun was not for her.

Other portraits in the book are unforgettable. Mulligan carries the wounds of her early childhood in Ireland with her for decades, the book makes clear, only to see them emerge in therapy years later.

One particular act of shocking cruelty by her own mother may have contributed to her long courtship with authority figures and her eventual decision to step out of their shadow.

Call of the Lark is the call of a holy spirit, Mulligan’s own as it happens, which as often happens takes years to find its voice and make its wishes known. But the delight of the book and her tale is that she has the wisdom to follow its promptings and step into herself at last. Mulligan’s tale is the nation’s, really.

Greenpoint Press.

The Dream of the Celt
By Mario Vargas Llosa

Irish patriot Roger Casement’s brief but brilliant life has inspired generations of scholars, activists, political leaders and, most crucially for his lasting legacy, artists.

It was Casement’s compassion for the oppressed people of the world –which must have found its origins in his own experience of oppression as a discreetly closeted homosexual at the turn of the 19th century – that got him into trouble.

When Casement dared to draw a parallel between the oppressed people of the Belgian Congo and the Amazon with the present condition of the pre-Easter Rising Irish he attracted the attention of the British authorities.

Witnessing the abuses meted out on colonized people first hand and shocked by their savagery, Casement eventually traded theory for practice and became involved in the cause of Irish freedom that ultimately led to his imprisonment and execution. 

For decades Ireland has refused to give this martyr for freedom his due because he came with baggage they didn’t want to acknowledge (he was gay). British intelligence, who were themselves known to harbor a few gay men in their lineups, ruthlessly exploited Ireland’s public morality to prevent Casement’s legend or activities from inspiring others.

As is so often the case with our most inspiring champions, it was non-Irish authors who understood and celebrated his challenge first. In The Dream of the Celt Mario Vargas Llosa restores this ahead of his own time figurehead to history and literature, where he deservedly belongs.

FSG, $27.

Flavors of Ireland: Celebrating Grand Places and Glorious Food
By Margaret Johnson

Gradually the Irish are realizing that the reputation of their home cooking skills has surpassed their near neighbors in Britain.

Right on cue there’s been a glut of genuinely sought after cookbooks to celebrate traditional Irish cooking and baking, and Flavors of Ireland is an example of the kind of modern Irish cookbook flying off the shelves internationally.

Margaret Johnson’s new book reflects the new enthusiasm for Irish cuisine and its signature elements.
With its emphasis on fresh and seasonal ingredients, it reminds readers that Ireland has a very distinctive food culture thanks to its geography, climate and unique history.

All of the familiar elements of Irish cooking are included in the new book: beef, lamb, and insanely rich dairy produce take pride of place alongside smoked, cured and spiced fish and meat.

But the book also takes time to remember other crucial Irish cooking ingredients like barley, wheat and rye too. For the weeknight hobbyist to the most sophisticated gourmet, Johnson’s knowledgeable book is sure to appeal to all comers.

Ambassador International, $19.99.

A look at books - Irish history and biographies

Oscar’s Shadow
By Eibhear Walsh

After his imprisonment and death, poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde continued to be a visible presence in popular culture in Ireland in a way that did not happen in England.

James Joyce had a lot to do with it. He wisely read Wilde’s sexuality and his art as challenges to the dominant political and moral hegemony of the British Empire (bolstering his own fight with official Ireland in the process).

For Ireland’s benighted writers Wilde became a standard bearer, a patron saint and a battering ram against officialdom in all its forms, which had the unintended effect of keeping him current, in a way that simply didn’t happen in Britain.

There Wilde had been imprisoned and made an example of.  No one imagined that they had actually added to his legend.  In England Wilde was a gay man -- in fact he was the gay man (the image that would define the stereotype for generations after) -- but in Ireland he was also the dissident and the patriot, which rehabilitated his reputation faster.

Walsh’s fascinating and meticulously researched new book examined unpublished archival material, and delves into a wealth of Irish critical studies and dramatizations of Wilde’s life and sexuality.  As a father who was also a homosexual, as a Anglo Irish writer who was unmistakably nationalist, as an aristocrat who was also marginalized to the outer limits of society, Wilde has been a mirror that an anxious postcolonial Ireland gazed into in search of its selfhood.

His legend will endure, as will his challenge.

Cork University Press, $50.

A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver
By Mark K. Shriver

Is there anything more miraculous than a genuinely good man? Or more mysterious, frankly? For years writer Mark K. Shriver has grappled with the inspirational legacy of his father, and this book is the expression of a grateful son.

Sarge, as he was known, lived an incident filled life. He had served in the navy in World War II. With his brother in law John F. Kennedy he started the Peace Corps.

He was the architect of President Johnson’s War on Poverty campaign. He served as ambassador to France. In 1972 he was a vice presidential candidate and in 1976 he ran for president.

Sarge was also married to Eunice Kennedy Shriver for 56 years, raising five children. Both were deeply committed to their family and their Catholic faith.

In sharp contrast to the conservative Christianity that has come to the fore in recent decades, Sarge saw his faith as a call to service to help the poor. He saw a continuum between his political life and his advocacy. His faith was a call to service, not a call to arms.

But to Mark Shriver he was simply dad. From a young age he was aware of his father’s standing on the political stage. His family was revered but it was also scrutinized and criticized.

A Good Man is his own estimation of his father, a love letter of sorts and an astounded thank you for encountering such a soul.

Henry Holt. $24.

Banished Babies
By Mike Milotte

Much has been written about the children abused by priests and about the tens of thousands of women condemned to indentured servitude in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, but what about Ireland’s once lucrative baby export industry?

The extend to which the Irish church and state stood side by side in organizing the export of thousands of Irish children in the 1950s is a tale to make your blood boil.

These helpless infants were not being sent off to well-to-do families in the U.S. In fact, there was a wealth of evidence to show that many of the children the church exported were being sent to people whose suitability as parents had not been vetted. Often they went to parents who had been rejected
previously by America’s own child welfare services.

But these babies were still sent out, and even when the alarm was raised the response was to do nothing. A child’s welfare during the most dominant years of church influence in Ireland in the 1950s mattered less than ensuring there was no bad publicity.

This shattering and scrupulously, even passionately, researched book brings us face to face with our own past. It will shock and infuriate all who read it as it uncovers the hidden truth about the nation’s utterly sordid past.

New Island, $22.

Steve Kazee and "Once" score Tony triumps - VIDEOS

Irish musical Once walked off with the largest haul of trophies at the 2012 Tony Awards last night and in this clip Steve Kazee (who won Best Actor in A Musical last night) shows us why.

Kazee, 36, who gives his all to his portrait of a wounded young Dubliner with a song in his heart, lost his mother at Easter whilst the show was still in preparation. Lat night Kazee remembered her in an emotional tribute that brought supporters to their feet.

In his acceptance speech he quoted Arthur O'Shaughnessy, the poet of Irish descent, saying : 'We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.'

For Kazee and for the cast and crew of Once, those dreams came true last night.

Review - Not drowning but swimming - “Jump in and Start Swimming”

Cover of James P. Naughton's new book

Author James P. Naughton’s Irish parents taught him a thing or two about resilience growing up. Arriving in the U.S. for the first time in the fiercely cold winter of 1930, at the very height of the Great Depression, his Co. Mayo-born mother and father learned the hard way how to survive -- and thrive -- against the odds.
Naughton’s own story is one of learning how to overcome hardships, too. After almost dropping out of high school and then being refused by every college he applied to due to his poor SAT scores, Naughton finally heeded his Irish mother’s wise words.

What she told him eventually became the title of his new book, Jump In and Start Swimming.

Heeding her never-say-die approach, Naughton finally found a college that would accept him. Although he intended to become a teacher and majored in English, he ultimately chose a business career instead, with spectacular results.

As a businessman he went on to great success, in his last post managing to raise a billion dollars in a single year.

With that kind of business acumen and experience behind him, it occurred to Naughton to share his practices with others, and this inspirational book is the result.

Some people will groan at the idea. American bookshelves are already heaving under the weight of every kind of Get Rich Look Good Be Happy self-help title out there, so what makes Naughton’s so special?

“I think that half the country doesn’t know that there’s a recession on,” Naughton tells the Irish Voice.

“I live in Rhode Island, and if you go to the restaurants and bars the lines are four deep. But if you visit Providence, parts of it look like a war zone.

“During the Great Depression during the 1930s you knew the country was in trouble because you could see the bread lines. Now we have another terrible recession, and this time the people most affected are harder to see.”

Naughton says he wrote his book to remind young people of his favorite saying -- you have to go along to get along. If you’re jobless and feeling the pinch, he says, try to land the first paying position you can because it can lead to better opportunities down the road.

“My own kids don’t want to hear that message because we wanted to protect them from the harsher side of life. But now that we’re in a more challenging economic climate they will have to get used to the idea that they won’t have a career and big bucks handed to them as a kind of birthright.”

The situation in 2012 is a tale of two economies, Naughton says.

“My own friends, people I’ve worked alongside on Wall Street, will deny to my face that there is a new level of hardship out there. For them it’s the best of times. They literally don’t see that half the country is often despairing.”

Naughton has personal experience of the economic winds that are prevailing since what he calls the atomic bomb of the second Great Depression began in 2008. It ended his own Wall Street career.

Working as a financial wholesaler, he was laid off without warning. “I thought I was invincible, I was the number one guy in the industry, let alone my firm, and then my oldest son got laid off -- and he has three kids,” Naughton said.

Naughton got laid off in what the financial industry calls a Reduction In Force (an RIF).

“It’s a new age term for a layoff,” he scoffs. “I assume the company decided that they would cut my job because of my age and everything else.

“But I remembered that my father came over in the worst economic crisis to ever hit the country and I don’t believe it can ever get that bad again because we have Social Security, we have unemployment, we have better protections now,” he adds.

To battle the challenges of the current time, the economic survival skills from an earlier age, first taught to him by his own parents, will be necessary to relearn. So Naughton’s book’s title refers to having the faith in oneself to navigate the looming icebergs.

“This is a great book for anyone who is seeking post-college employment, the returning veteran, the unemployed and the underemployed. It’s based on my own life and career and the lessons it taught me that can’t be taught in school.  The book also offers high school students a reason to stay in school,” Naughton explains. “My message is start somewhere. Take a position. Trust your own abilities and create your own path. That’s the best way to thrive that there is.”

For information on Jump In and Start Swimming, visit www.keypublishingcompany.com, or call 401-486-9601.

A look at books - Irish fiction and non-fiction literature to get your teeth in to

The Reckoning

By Jane Casey

Jane Casey’s life looks like an audition for the role of first-rate crime writer. Born and raised in Dublin, she graduated from Oxford University and Trinity College Dublin, and then worked in London for a time as a book editor until the urge to write her own works eventually became too strong.

Marrying a criminal barrister in London who specializes in prosecution, her husband’s day to day life is filled with police officers, criminals, reluctant witnesses, judges and juries – basically the entire stock and trade of a crime writers life.

So if The Reckoning, her second thrilling tour of London’s back streets, is filled with the kind of illuminating details that ground it in reality you’ll know why.

When London detective Maeve Kerrigan sets out to find the killer of a series of sex offenders, she starts with the theory that it’s the work of a mobster who’s hoping to track down a missing girl. But the facts keep pointing in other directions and the lid keeps coming off more and more long buried grudges, with explosive results. 

Casey is a particularly acute reader of human behavior, and there is more than a hint of the psychological depth of the classic crime drama Prime Suspect at work in this tense and twisted tale.

Minotaur, $24.95.

Malarky

By Anakana Schofield

Well, this is a particularly lively tale by an Irish Canadian with a superb understanding of the cadences of Irish speech. In Malarky we meet an Irish widow named Philomena who refuses to be sunk by whatever indignities life tries to serve her. 

Recently bereaved, she has caught her son in the fields with another man. Then a half mad local informs her of all the real or imagines infidelities of her late husband. It’s enough to oppress the spirits of the brightest, but Philomena is made of stronger stuff. 

Schofield’s richest gift is for spirited dialogue which crackles with humor and energy in this blackly funny, half mad tale. Portraits of working class Irish female eccentrics are pretty thin on the ground, and for that reason alone this divertingly brilliant book is entirely worth your time. 

This is the most distinctive novel of its kind I’ve read in a decade. 

Biblioasis, $16.95.

A Fierce Local: Memoirs of My Love Affair With Ireland

By Harvey Gould

Harvey Gould is not your typical Irish moniker, but nonetheless he’s a “fierce local” in his adopted homeland, which he clearly loves unreservedly. So how did a nice Jewish boy from Chicago become a (literally) full-blooded Irishman?

It may have been thanks to the blood transfusion that saved his life during his 13th trip to Ireland. Suffering from a chronic blood disorder, he visited a local doctor when he started feeling poorly. 

She drew some vials and sent them – and him – to the hospital immediately. Three hours later he was having the blood transfusion that saved his life.

Gould, who was a former trial lawyer in California, enjoys the symbolism. All his American blood was replaced by Irish blood, which is taking matters to a bit of an extreme. 

Marrying Karen Duffy, an Irish American girl from Washington Heights, was the transformative event in Gould’s life. Both had been married before to people within their own faith traditions, both subsequently divorced and took a long time to decide they belonged together, but eventually they did.

Because of that union Gould eventually discovered the other great love of his life, Ireland. Visit after visit brought him closer to the elusive character of the Irish themselves, and this memoir is a vivid and clearly heartfelt celebration of the land and its people.

iUniverse.com, $22.95.

On the Run

Colm O’Gaora

When Colm O’Gaora’s mother was young there were still people living in her locality that had an excellent memory of the Year of the French. O’Gara’s father was a sailor as a young man and remembered hearing of Lincoln’s death whilst stopping at Cape Verde. 

O’Gaora himself was fated to live in interesting times, writing one of the most vivid accounts of the Irish War of Independence in the Irish language. This remarkable new book is a translation into English of his classic telling. 

O’Gaora was an important figure in the development of republicanism and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in the west of Ireland. In the early 1920s that meant living your life on the run from British forces. This turbulent era of Irish history leaps to life in a memoir that is deservedly reprinted year after year.

Dufour, $26.95.

A look at books - Irish cooking, history and fiction

Irish Traditional Cooking
By Darina Allen

Can you call yourself Irish if you don’t own at least two Irish cookery books by Darina Allen? Simply put no one else has ever assembled the classic Irish dishes with the range and scope and appreciation for Irish tradition that she has.

In Irish Traditional Cooking Allen has assembled over 300 recipes that are as wholesome and unpretentious and the books title. Allen is a seasonal cook, which means she lists dishes that are in tune with the produce on offer year round, which makes this book an especially worthwhile purchase for discerning cooks.

This is magical food, prepared and presented in simple step-by-step measures that won’t intimidate. It’s made simple because Allen’s knowledge is authoritative, and she knows Irish cuisine inside out.

What’s especially fascinating is her knowledge not just of the recipes but also of the Irish cooking and baking traditions that produced them and her passion to preserve them is infectious.

Food can be a powerful gateway into the past and Allen knows this, and her chapter on making Barm Brack will probably take you back to your own childhood days in Ireland if you were lucky enough to experience it. If you weren’t this book is as close as you are ever likely to come. It can not be recommended highly enough.

Kyle Books, $35.00

Pure Cork
By Michael Lenihane

The garb changes from generation to generation, but the faces in the photographs in Michael Lenihane’s new book clearly belong to our tribe. From its origins as a medieval walled town to its status now as one of the top ten cities on the Lonely Planet’s Guide, Lenihane’s book Pure Cork traces the illustrious history of this mold-breaking city and the vivid people who make their homes there.

In a way never seen before Lenihane’s new book visually captures the city’s rapid evolution through a series of judiciously chosen photographs, post cards, maps, sketches and drawings, bringing to life the sights and sounds of the of the rebel city in the process.

Two hundred years of Irish history is contained within its pages and it’ll be a gift best appreciated by those who know what it means to be pure Cork, boy!

Dufour, $39.95.

Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails
Edited by Phillip O’Ceallaigh

The Irish are the world’s acknowledged masters of the short story form. In this punchy new collection from the innovative Irish publishing group The Stinging Fly Press we’re introduced to a new generation of Irish writers, this time edited by the award winning short story writer Phillip O’Ceallaigh.

This is a discerning new collection of emerging and established Irish voices that at times achieves startling originality and surprise with tales that involve murder, mayhem, love, confrontation and even sedate pastimes like taking Italian lessons taking unexpected turns.

The Irish short story form (and its writers) are looking further than the four green fields to Europe and in acknowledgement the editor has for the first time included European writers in the mix, adding an extra dimension to the already rich layers of metaphor and cultural exchange that already underscore the Irish experience.

Dufour, $21.95.

Citizen Dwyer
By Sean McCarthy

Authors often have to issue a caveat when it come to writing about Irish history, as if to explain the at times blatantly contradictory attitudes of the people themselves. This is as it should be. Everything is always being contested in Ireland; from the name of a child to the boundary of a property, you can be certain that someone somewhere is going to take a different view, and most likely at the worst possible moment.

Meet Wicklow Chieftain Michael Dwyer, the hero of McCarthy’s novel. Composed of delightfully contrasting characteristics, he’s a revolutionary idealist, and inspirational guerilla leader and a violent alcoholic. Hey, you have to take the bad with the good, after all.

In McCarthy’s sprawling new tale we follow McCarthy and his family as they are deported to a penal colony in Australia. In case you’re wondering it’s a fictional tale based on real characters, and it tells a sobering tale about the ravages of an uncontrollable addiction. Booze can make a meal of even the most accomplished men and so it proves in McCarthy’s moral fable.

Dufour, $27.95

Looks at Books - New books reviewed for your consideration

Fighting Tuesdays
Edited By Emily Firetog and Declan Meade

FOURTH year, or transition year as its also known, is the much beloved year bookended by two fearful exams in the Irish school system. For students it’s the year when you can relax a bit and begin to discover your teenage identity finally. If you’re lucky it’ll be one of the happiest of your life too.
In Fighting Tuesdays the Stinging Fly Press invited students in that age bracket to submit original short stories, 24 of which have been selected for this book.
What makes this one worth your time is the remarkable sophistication in evidence in these pages. These stories aren’t just powerful; they’re a timely portrait of modern Ireland.
Spanning the great themes of friendship, love, bullying, drugs, alcohol, football and finding yourself, the humor and the dialogue crackle with the fierce urgency of youth itself.
Dufour, $15.95.

Setting the Truth On Fire: The Inside Story of the Bloody Sunday Campaign
By Julieann Campbell

IT took 18 years and 28 families to uncover the truth of what happened on Bloody Sunday, that lamentable day that changed the course of history in the North, but the sheer injustice of those 14 shocking killings would provide their inspiration in years to come.
United by their grief and outrage over the killings these families, who were in the beginning mostly strangers to each other, met and started a campaign for a new investigation into the shootings and for the exoneration of the victims.
Derry woman Julieann Campbell is the niece of the youngest victim, Jackie Duddy. A journalist and award winning poet, she was press officer for the Bloody Sunday families and saw their struggle from the inside, resulting in one of the most illuminating portraits of the campaign yet written.
It took almost two decades, but that determined campaign ended with Lord Saville’s historic report that found the British Army’s actions on the day “unjustified” and “unjustifiable.” Campbell’s book is a testament to their unflagging courage, but it reminds us too that what motivated them most was love.
Dufour, $24.95.

The Chosen
By Arlene Hunt

Irish writer Arlene Hunt makes the business of crafting a terrific new thriller look easy. Her latest introduces us to Jessie Conway, a hard working teacher at a local high school who unwittingly becomes the target of a serial killer.
Brilliantly crafted from the beginning, Hunt makes her heroine likeable and tough, which makes what happens next all the more involving. Psychotic killers are no match for the power of love and hope and so Hunt sets the stage for a showdown that is as riveting as it is believable.
There’s a cinematic sweep to Hunt’s work that suggests a bidding war may be in her future, but in the meantime you should acquaint yourself with one of the most interesting new voices to have emerged in thrillers in recent years.
Dufour, $21.95.

Just Follow the Floodlights: The Complete Guide to League of Ireland Football
By Brian Kennedy

IN 1921 the Irish weren’t just founding the Republic they were founding a national football team. Ninety-one years on that league is still going strong.
Forty-seven teams have comprised the League, and each has produced its own storied history. Ireland has always produced a surplus of eccentric characters, local color and victories against all the odds and this handsomely illustrated book is a time capsule that brings the fondest hopes of generations of players and fans back to life.
Dufour, $29.95.

1798: Tomorrow The Barrow’s We’ll Cross
By Joe Murphy

WHAT could be more Irish than the tale of a family shattered by divided loyalties? In this case it’s the tragic generation of 1798 when that all out and disastrous rebellion tears at the national fabric, with consequences that will be felt for centuries.
Joe Murphy’s enthusiasm for the period and for the men and women who lived and died during it leaps off every page of his new novel, a swashbuckling romance filled with last stands and epic battles.
Tragically the fight against the rapidly growing British Empire is as nothing against the internal squabbles that erupt between the United Irishmen and the Loyalists and Murphy reminds us that the enemies within are often the bitterest we will ever encounter.
Dufour, $22.95.