Fintan O'Toole – Ireland's leading public intellectual and author of Heroic Failure – tells a history of Ireland in his own time.
Fintan O'Toole is the author of Heroic Failure, Ship of Fools, A Traitor's Kiss, White Savage and other acclaimed books. He is a columnist for the Irish Times and the Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton University. He writes regularly for the Guardian, New York Review of Books, New York Times and other British and American journals.
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*
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*
Scintillating... Combines personal with political on a journey to
the heart of Irish identity'
*Business Post*
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*
Our leading public intellectual has written the bible on
incorrigible Irish roguery
*Irish Independent*
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*
At heart, it's an investigation of the arrival of modernity in
Ireland and just how much upheaval it caused
*Herald*
Ireland's past is here painted by Fintan O'Toole mainly through
villains, victims, eccentrics and scandals
*BBC History Magazine*
An enthralling, panoramic book, a personal history of six decades
of Irish life, from one of the foremost chroniclers of contemporary
Ireland. With his customary deep erudition and sly wit, O'Toole
weaves together an astonishing array of material... Jostling with
anecdotes and arresting statistics, We Don't Know Ourselves is a
feast: a deeply absorbing chronicle of the 'known and unknowable'
and of the profound transformation of a place'
*Patrick Radden Keefe*
A sweeping thesis about Irish identity... We Don't Know Ourselves
may well be the best thing he's ever written'
*Sunday Business Post*
A personal and empathetic account of the social upheavals his
country has weathered since 1958... This is an uplifting, almost
playful read, with suggestive analysis lying beneath skilful
vignettes'
*Financial Times*
An illuminating, provocative and very entertaining look at how
Ireland has changed over the author's lifetime, with the massive
social, economic and political changes since his birth in 1958
linked to episodes in his own story
*RTÉ*
There's no shirking the stark reality of postwar Ireland, as Fintan
O'Toole takes us on a personal journey that mirrors Ireland's
seismic shift to modernity... This book's early chapters are among
the best I've read about Ireland in the decades after the Second
World War, at once evocative, moving, funny and furious'
*Sunday Times*
Told in beautiful, crisp prose and enlivened by anecdotes from the
front line, We Don't Know Ourselves is the story of that victory –
with all its ups and downs. Balanced and fearless, it is essential
reading for anyone who wants to understand modern Ireland – or
thinks they already do
*Irish Examiner*
A wonderfully readable account of the Irish State's turbulent
coming of age and, to my mind, it is the nearest we will come to
making sense of who we are how we got here
*Irish Independent*
This is an essential read for anyone who wishes to understand
modern Ireland
*The Clare Champion*
I'm sure we all have books we're looking forward to over Christmas.
Fintan O'Toole's We Don't Know Ourselves [...] is top of my
stack
*Sunday Independent*
An astonishing book, fresh and passionate. Deeply moving but often
funny and wry, a chronicle for our times. The most remarkable Irish
nonfiction book I've read in the last 10 years
*David McRedmond, Irish Times*
Truly, this is a book for the ages
*Maria Dickinson, Irish Times*
Masterly, fascinating and frequently horrifying
*TLS*
Only a writer with O'Toole's experience and finesse could pull off
a memoir as audacious as this
*Meath Chronicle*
A brilliant interweaving of memories (though this is emphatically
not a memoir) and engrossing social and historical narrative... An
essential book for anyone who wishes to understand modern
Ireland
*Irish Central*
An essential read for anyone who wishes to understand modern
Ireland
*The Clare Champion*
It is a mark of O'Toole's intense gaze that while he does cover the
northern tragedy by far the greater part of this powerful book is
devoted to the Republic in which he grew up in a working-class
Dublin family in the late 1950s
*Slugger O'Toole*
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