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Top of the pile
87
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
88/100Critics
80/100Scholars
93/100Author:
Fintan O'Toole
Publisher:
Liveright
Date:
March 15, 2022
An Irish Times columnist looks back at the economic and cultural changes that have rocked Ireland since his birth in 1958, mingling his own personal stories with the news of the day that marked distinct shifts in Irish life.
What The Reviewers Say
We Don’t Know Ourselves...may appear a daunting doorstopper of a book, but it is leavened by the brilliance of O’Toole’s insights and wit, and by the story of his own life, which he expertly intertwines into a larger historical narrative. O’Toole’s Ireland is, familiarly, a nation of grand myths and discordant realities.
One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span.
O’Toole’s sweeping, intimate book...is in a category all its own, a blend of reporting, history, analysis, and argument, explored through the lens of the author’s sensibility and experience.
... reading Fintan O’Toole’s new book...is like reading a great tragicomic Irish novel, rich in memoir and record, calamity and critique. The book contains funny and terrible things, details and episodes so pungent that they must surely have been stolen from a fantastical artificer like Flann O’Brien.
