Books – Page 10 – Slugger O'Toole

Philip Orr’s New Perspectives – Politics, Religion and Conflict in Mid-Antrim, 1911-1914: Book Review and Website Launch

Gladys Ganiel on October 8, 2012, 4:08 pm

| Readers 317

A valuable resource on local history went digital last week with the launch of a new website called ‘New Perspectives’ on Home Rule,hosted by the Braid Mid-Antrim Museum in Ballymena. The content of the website is based on a book by Philip Orr, New Perspectives: Politics, Religion and Conflict in Mid-Antrim, 1911-1914, published last year by the Mid-Antrim Museum. The website is geared towards classroom teaching in years 10 and 14, but includes images and access to materials that would …

Friday afternoon thread: Why confession works in a world of ‘cheaters’…

Mick Fealty on September 21, 2012, 2:45 pm

| Readers 52

This is really worth watching… It suggests the very Catholic option of opening a new page by having a confession process does in the longer term help people to behave better… Presented by Dan Ariely, author of The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves. Mick FealtyMick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking …

Breakthrough on Ireland’s bank debt?

Mick Fealty on June 29, 2012, 6:02 am

| Readers 47

This looks like a breakthrough on the Republic’s bank debt problem: According to a statement issued at 4am (Irish time), eurozone leaders pledged to “examine the situation of the Irish financial sector with the view of further improving the sustainability of the well-performing adjustment programme.” Mick FealtyMick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK …

Johnston McMaster’s Overcoming Violence – Book Review

Gladys Ganiel on June 14, 2012, 3:16 pm

| Readers 357

In his latest book, Overcoming Violence: Dismantling an Irish History and Theology – An Alternative Vision (Columba, 2012), Rev Dr Johnston McMaster offers a challenge to everyone living on this island: Entering into the increasingly talked about ‘decade of commemorations,’ how might we remember our painful past together, in order that we might walk forward together? At the launch of the book, the Rev Harold Good emphasized its challenging character, saying: ‘I found this to be a very confrontational book. …

“This coming 16 June, Radio 4 will be a wall-to-wall Joycefest…”

Pete Baker on June 3, 2012, 8:00 pm

| Readers 48

As The Observer’s Alex Clark notes This coming 16 June, Radio 4 will be a wall-to-wall Joycefest, kicking off at 9am and running until midnight: a new, five-and-a-half hour dramatisation of Ulysses, narrated by Stephen Rea and starring Henry Goodman, Niamh Cusack and Andrew Scott, will be punctuated by broadcasts by Mark Lawson in Dublin and discussions about the book’s place in 20th-century literature. To reassure those who might quail at some of the book’s more full-blooded material, the Beeb …

Against the use and promotion of ‘hate speech’…

Mick Fealty on May 28, 2012, 4:28 pm

| Readers 54

Of all the reasons to write a book this one’s got to the most incongruous: i.e. the receipt of an email saying “YOU ARE A TOTALITARIAN ASSHOLE”. Nice piece from John Paul Stevens in the New York Review of Books, in which he reviews Jeffery Waldron’s theses that freedom of speech should be tempered particularly when it comes to the use of ‘hate speech’. In the end Stevens is not convinced, but quotes Waldron’s call for the reinforcement of civility …

A flexible library service for the 21st century?

Mick Fealty on May 8, 2012, 11:00 pm

| Readers 48

Following Alan’s piece on libraries, I picked this ‘advertorial’ from Google plus this evening… about how a US county library system is cutting costs and improving flexibility in their free at the point of delivery services by enabling the whole library service act as a functioning unit as opposed to the one discrete library… Mick FealtyMick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a …

The Imperfectionists (Tom Rachman) – an insight into a newspaper that’s maybe not so fictional

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on April 16, 2012, 9:00 am

| Readers 148

The Imperfectionists (Tom Rachman) book cover

‘news’ is often a polite way of saying ‘editor’s whim’ Given the shift from print to online and e-ink, maybe Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists was a suitable first first book for me to finish reading on the Kindle. Considering the economic pressures on the newspaper industry, his novel perhaps captures the spirit and soul of a trade that is spinning down the plug hole, soon never to be seen again: a Lake Wobegon of the newspaper trade, complete with its …

Round up of Tuesday’s Political Studies Association conference

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on April 3, 2012, 11:52 pm

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Political Studies Association

If you want to get a flavour of the proceedings at the Political Studies Association conference on its opening day, then the Storify collation below will bring you some of the images, tweets and sounds of the day. Particular highlights included: the Opening Plenary with David Blunkett, Peter Riddell and Matthew Flinders; and the late afternoon Northern Ireland Roundtable in which Malachi O’Doherty, Conall McDevitt and Peter Weir agreed on many things, while Katy Hayward was questioning, and Lord Paul …

Review: To Kill a Mockingbird

Allan LEONARD (Mr Ulster) on April 3, 2012, 12:06 pm

| Readers 172

20120403 To Kill a Mockingbird

Somehow I escaped reading this essential school text, with its story of racism in 1930s American South. Living in Northern Ireland, I draw parallels with sectarianism, with its similar bigotry and prejudice. To Kill a Mockingbird was part of a Unite Against Hate campaign event at Parliament Buildings in Northern Ireland, which I’ve written about separately. There is one passage that directly deals with religious difference: Miss Maudie settled her bridgework. “You know old Mr Radley was a foot-washing …

Titanic: was it all right when it left here?

Patrick Corrigan on April 2, 2012, 12:03 pm

| Readers 408

Not according to metallurgists Tim Foecke and Jennifer Hooper McCarty whose research has suggested that dodgy Harland and Wolff rivets were at fault for allowing the Titanic’s hull to be ripped apart by the pressure of the iceberg impact. With six of the hull’s chambers exposed to the Atlantic waters, the “unsinkable” ship lasted less than three hours, not enough time for rescue boats to reach those (disproportionately poorer) passengers left without access to a lifeboat (the White Star line …

Unionists, Loyalists, and Conflict Transformation. A book about how things are changing.

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on March 12, 2012, 9:02 am

| Readers 114

Book cover - Unionists, Loyalists, and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland by Lee Smithey

Unionists, Loyalists, and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland is a new academic tome by lecturer and researcher Lee Smithey. In the book the Pennsylvania academic outlines his findings based on 67 interviews over eighteen months with grassroots activists in unionist and loyalist communities and organisations. This is largely a book about men, even though they make up less than half of Northern Ireland’s population. Surely conflict transformation, as a process that includes broad-based cultural change, must involve both men and …

A Political History of the Two Irelands competition…

Mick Fealty on February 20, 2012, 2:58 pmComments Off | Readers 1968

It’s not often we get free things to give away to our readers, but courtesy of Palgrave Macmillan we have a nice paperback copy of Brian M Walker’s excellent history of partition of the island and how identities shifted in both the north east and the south and west: as most of the territory that is now the Republic was once universally referred to. Which Catholic church in Fermanagh was part of the local Remembrance day ceremonies until the 1980s? …

The Creative Class and Northern Ireland

Allan LEONARD (Mr Ulster) on January 30, 2012, 11:24 am

| Readers 102

As part of NICVA’s series of masterclasses from its Centre for Economic Empowerment project, there was a morning seminar on the topic of the “creative class” (as popularised by Richard Florida) and its applicability to Northern Ireland. The agenda was to: Explain Richard Florida’s idea of the “creative class” and the link between economic outcomes and the ability of a region to facilitate creativity and diversity Explore the link between a successful economy and social issues, such as community division, …

“I loathe Ireland and the Irish.”

Pete Baker on January 10, 2012, 3:10 pm

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In the Irish Times, Brian Cosgrove takes up temporary residence in An Irishman’s Diary in the hope that, with the lifting of European copyright restrictions on James Joyce’s major works, a greater familiarity with Joyce’s “sometimes ruthless realism” may change the nature of the “annual Edwardian charade” that is Bloomsday. From the Irish Times The devastating cultural effects of the Ireland in which he had come to adult consciousness are amply dramatised in many of the short stories in Dubliners . These deal with …

The Written World

Pete Baker on January 6, 2012, 4:10 pm

| Readers 50

Here’s something to keep you occupied over the weekend. [Will there be a quiz? – Ed] Possibly… The BBC magazine has an short and interesting, but un-embeddable, audio slide-show of Melvyn Bragg’s Radio 4 five-parter, In Our Time: The Written World. The British Library has more online information about the texts and technology featured in each of the programmes. From Chinese oracle bones, the oldest items in the library, to 17th and 18th Century news books, news pamphlets and newspapers. As …

Douglas Murray – Bloody Sunday: Truth, Lies and the Saville Inquiry, Book Review

Gladys Ganiel on January 6, 2012, 8:02 am

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The aftermath of the Saville Inquiry into the events around Bloody Sunday has left me, and I suspect many others, with one enduring image: Prime Minister David Cameron’s apology in the House of Commons, where he says that the actions of the British Army were ‘unjustified and unjustifiable.’ But there’s a lot more to the findings of the Saville Inquiry than that. Douglas Murray’s 2011 book, Bloody Sunday: Truth, Lies and the Saville Inquiry, distils some of the most relevant …

“It was a trivial problem that… occurs every year”

Pete Baker on December 28, 2011, 3:42 pm

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Just your average family gathering at Christmas, with a bit of an argument about the seating cleaning arrangements… Scuffles have broken out between rival groups of Greek Orthodox and Armenian clerics over a turf war in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. Bemused tourists looked on as about 100 priests fought with brooms while cleaning the church in preparation for Orthodox Christmas, on 7 January. Palestinian police armed with batons and shields broke up the clashes. Groups of priests have clashed …

Debating the Churches’ Role in the Peace in Northern Ireland

Gladys Ganiel on December 18, 2011, 1:53 pm

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This morning’s Sunday Sequence featured a substantial debate (about 35 minutes into the recorded programme) on a new book,Religion, Civil Society and Peace in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press 2011), written by sociologists John Brewer, Gareth Higgins and Francis Teeney. The debate was framed in an opening vignette by presenter William Crawley in uncompromising terms, when he summed up its key message as: ‘the main churches here walked away from their moral responsibility to give leadership during the Troubles.’ The …

Christopher Hitchens, 1949 – 2011

Patrick Corrigan on December 16, 2011, 10:22 am

| Readers 29

Writer Christopher Hitchens has died aged 62. He was as contrary as he was brilliant. Here is a brief In Memoriam from Vanity Fair (his outlet of choice since 1992) and, here, a longer tribute from his friend Christopher Buckley Stanley in The New Yorker. Better, perhaps, though to post one of Hitchens’ own writings in tribute. I’ll make no apology for choosing one of his most remarked upon pieces of recent years — his 2008 Vanity Fair article on waterboarding, Believe …