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.

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.

... [a] masterly, fascinating and frequently horrifying 'personal history'.

O’Toole’s book also gave me insights into the virulent racism that ran through my community.

We Don’t Know Ourselves is 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. O’Toole insists the book is a not a memoir, and that is true, but it contains a rich vein of personal and familial experiences.

In We Don’t Know Ourselves, the years proceed chronologically and thematically.

... an illuminating, provocative and very entertaining look at how Ireland has changed over the author’s lifetime.

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.

Among the many traditional histories and current political commentaries, this book stands out.

... [a] dense and lively chronicle...elucidated with the acuity and sardonic wit that we might expect from this veteran journalist and critic.

... engrossing.

Fintan O’Toole introduced me to a different Ireland in his masterful We Don’t Know Ourselves.

Tracing the course of the nation from 1958, the year he was born, into the 21st century, O'Toole shows with devastating detail how the Irish people's willfully blind, secretive disposition shielded them from acknowledging what was going on all around them.

In this utterly fascinating and ultimately disturbing book about modern Ireland, Fintan O’Toole, the Irish Times journalist, is at his best as a reporter and commentator.

What’s personal about his latest book sustains his blend of anecdote, research, op-ed opining and critique of Ireland’s psuedo-secular cant, Church-State collusion and clerical corruption. His previous collections of his journalism pepper his own experiences into his analyses, and this marks him as a steady producer of what purports to be anti-establishment freethinking. But We Don’t Know Ourselves persists in presenting O’Toole as at the vanguard of what, nearing half a century now, has evolved into a new creed. That the global enterprises that have brought both jobs and immigrants through the nation’s self-promotion as an tax-haven full of eager educated young knowledge workers represent its true orientation: towards Europe, turned away from Brexit.

... sparkling.

In essence, O’Toole’s book is the story of how that [old] Ireland died and a new Ireland was born. It’s a familiar tale, and in many ways his book is an old-fashioned Whiggish history, a paean to progress. Darkness gives way to light, superstition and repression to secularism and modernity. Is he too harsh on the old world, then? Probably not. Indeed, I read much of the first half of this book with horrified fascination, unable to avert my eyes from the awful details.

Being there or thereabouts at these crucial times may be the hook for this 'personal history', but the most significant of all these situations was the fact that his father was a bus conductor, and he was raised in Crumlin. And from this all else flows—the moral authority of one who did not have access to Ireland’s labyrinth of inside tracks.

... a forceful account of how Ireland entered the modern age, beginning with his own personal history, which he effectively ties in with an almost year-by-year recounting of what happened in his country during the late 20th century.

... [an] astute analysis.