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Features of We Don’t Know Ourselves PDF
Winner • 2021 An Post Irish Book Award ― Nonfiction Book of the Year • from the judges: “The most remarkable Irish nonfiction book I’ve read in the last 10 years”; “[A] book for the ages.” We Don’t Know Ourselves PDF
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.
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Description of We Don’t Know Ourselves PDF
The life of extraordinary people must be shared and We Don’t Know Ourselves PDF is one of its kind. It has all the information regarding the gentleman/woman’s struggles and their story of success or fiasco that every individual can learn from for their lives. It has grossed all charts and is the most recommended and praised books among those that read biographies and lives of people. A must read for a peaceful and wiser livelihood. Available without cost here.
The Authors
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist for the Irish Times and a professor at Princeton University. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Guardian and the author of several books, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and Dublin, Ireland.
Dimensions and Characteristics of We Don’t Know Ourselves PDF
| Publisher | Liveright (March 15, 2022) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 624 pages |
| International Standard Book Number-10 | 1631496530 |
| International Standard Book Number-13 | 978-1631496530 |
| Item Weight | 2.22 pounds |
| Dimensions | 6.4 x 1.6 x 9.6 inches |
Top reviews
“Engrossing… With deep research, a journalistic eye for detail, and a series of revealing personal anecdotes, he paints a vivid and affecting portrait of Irish life, touching on politics, religion, economics, and pop culture. The result is a comprehensive work of social criticism that tells the story of a country that was once so fixated on maintaining an idealized vision of its past that it almost gave up on the prospect of a better future…. We Don’t Know Ourselves is a powerful book, not just for what it says about Ireland, but for what it has to teach us about national identity in general. It’s a lesson that feels particularly relevant in the United States today.”
― Michael Patrick Brady, Boston Globe
“[M]asterly, fascinating . . . O’Toole, a journalist, historian and academic, is Ireland’s pre-eminent public intellectual . . . We Don’t Know Ourselves is surely his masterpiece, a long detailed and beautifully executed study . . . O’Toole has a marvelously sharp eye for the illuminating fact, the telling anecdote, the overlooked or forgotten piece of history; but he also has a poet’s gift for figurative language.”
― John Banville, Times Literary Supplement
“[S]parkling . . . we encounter O’Toole as a Zelig-like figure with an amusingly personal chain of connections to the great events and characters . . . the quiet heroes of We Don’t Know Ourselves are the Irish people, who O’Toole shows to have been ahead of their political and spiritual leaders in being ready to face the contradictions that underpinned national life . . . an uplifting, almost playful read, with suggestive analysis lying beneath skillful vignettes.”
― Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, Financial Times
“The centenary of Irish independence has inspired a flood of writing. Among the many traditional histories and current political commentaries, this book stands out. It charts the extraordinary economic, social, and political transformation of Ireland since 1958, the year the author was born… The author, perhaps Ireland’s foremost public intellectual, employs a unique combination of intimately personal narrative, piquant facts and figures, and sharp (often ironic) commentary to describe the experience of this transformation.”
― Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs
“This powerful book is a lucid, highly informative amalgam of memoir, national history, economic, social and cultural observation, and behind-the-scenes political intelligence. . . . [O’Toole’s] narrative has the color and movement of a novel, with subplots and villains aplenty.”
― Katherine A. Powers, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Reading Fintan O’Toole’s transporting We Don’t Know Ourselves is an experience close to hunger; even at 600-plus pages, there is so much richness here you want to gulp it right down…. It’s an epic story that O’Toole tells through both sweeping narratives and intimate detail…. While O’Toole laces into some targets with icy sarcasm, he is overall a generous and sympathetic observer, with an appreciation for human inconsistency. If this was not the case, could he have written so eloquently about the totemic slab of cheese known as Riverdance?”
― Chris Barsanti, Popmatters
“O’Toole unpacks this truth with passion and smouldering rage. Although set an ocean away, the book holds lessons, about national self-delusion and its repercussions, that are relevant here…. We Don’t Know Ourselves is a masterpiece of perceptive analysis, made accessible by personal anecdotes and clear, passionate prose…. This timely book reminds us how unknown knowns have a way of eventually becoming known knowns, how buried children often find a way to speak from the grave.”
― David Dunne, Literary Review of Canada
“Fintan O’Toole introduced me to a different Ireland in his masterful We Don’t Know Ourselves…. O’Toole demonstrates sharp writing and gifted story telling talents… He puts the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland into a nuanced context reserved for a skilled journalist with a keen, experienced eye…. O’Toole reinforces his insights with a wide range of reporting…. After reading We Don’t Know Ourselves, I placed it on my bookshelf with a deeper understanding of myself and my origins.”
― James O’Shea, National Book Review
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