We don't know ourselves : a personal history of modern Ireland / Fintan O'Toole.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

O'Toole, Fintan, 1958- author.

Contributor:

Anne and Joseph Trachtman Memorial Book Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ireland--History--20th century.

Ireland.

Ireland--History--21st century.

O'Toole, Fintan, 1958-.

O'Toole, Fintan.

Genre:

History.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

616 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First American edition.

Other Title:

We do not know ourselves

Personal history of modern Ireland

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2022.

Summary:

"A celebrated Irish writer's magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world. Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government--in despair, because all the young people were leaving--opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don't Know Ourselves, O'Toole, one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society--perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin's streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis. A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O'Toole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of "deliberate unknowing," which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don't Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us"-- Provided by publisher

"A celebrated Irish writer's magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The Loneliest Boy in the World

1958: On Noah's Ark

1959: Modern Family

1960: Comanche Country

1961: Balubaland

1962: Cathode Ní Houlihan

1963: The Dreamy Movement of the Stairs

1962-1999: Silence and Smoothness

1965: Our Boys

1966: The GPO Trouser Suit

1967: The Burial of Leopold Bloom

1968: Requiem

1969: Frozen Violence

1970: The Killer Chord

1971: Little Plum

1972: Death of a Nationalist

1973: Into Europe

1976: The Walking Dead

1975-1980: Class Acts

1971-1983: Bungalow Bliss

1979: Bona Fides

1980-1981: No Blue Hills

1980-1981: A Beggar on Horseback

1979-1982: The Body Politic

1981-1983: Foetal Attractions

1982: Wonders Taken For Signs

1984-1985: Dead Babies and Living Statues

1987-1991: As Oil Is to Texas

1986-1992: Internal Exiles

1989: Freaks

1985-1992: Conduct Unbecoming

1990-1992: Mature Recollection

1992: Not So Bad Myself

1992-1994: Meanwhile Back at the Ranch

1993: True Confessions

1993-1994: Angel Paper

1998: The Uses of Uncertainty

1990-2015: America at Home

1990-2000: Unsuitables from a Distance

1999: The Cruelty Man

1997-2008: The Makeover

2000-2008: Tropical Ireland

2009-2013: Jesus Fucking Hell and God

2018- : Negative Capability.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 572-598) and index.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Livezey Fund bookplate.

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Anne and Joseph Trachtman Memorial Book Fund.

ISBN:

9781631496530

1631496530

OCLC:

1287087071