The #1 Irish Times bestsellerWINNER of the An Post Irish Book Awards'A clear-eyed, myth-dispelling masterpiece' Marian Keyes'Sweeping, authoritative and profoundly intelligent' Colm Toibin, Guardian'With the pace and twists of an enthralling novel' Irish Times'Evocative, moving, funny and furious' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times'An enthralling, panoramic book' Patrick Radden Keefe'A book that will remain important for a very long time' An Post Irish Book AwardWe Don't Know Ourselves is a very personal vision of recent Irish history from the year of O'Toole's birth, 1958, down to the present. Ireland has changed almost out of recognition during those decades, and Fintan O'Toole's life coincides with that arc of transformation. The book is a brilliant interweaving of memories (though this is emphatically not a memoir) and engrossing social and historical narrative. This was the era of Eamon de Valera, Jack Lynch, Charles Haughey and John Charles McQuaid, of sectarian civil war in the North and the Pope's triumphant visit in 1979, but also of those who began to speak out against the ruling consensus - feminists, advocates for the rights of children, gay men and women coming out of the shadows. We Don't Know Ourselves is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand modern Ireland.

It is a mark of O'Toole's intense gaze that while he does cover the northern tragedy by far the greater part of this powerful book is devoted to the Republic in which he grew up in a working-class Dublin family in the late 1950s

Vorwort
Fintan O'Toole - Ireland's leading public intellectual and author of Heroic Failure - tells a history of Ireland in his own time.

Autorentext
Fintan O'Toole is the author of Heroic Failure, Ship of Fools, A Traitor's Kiss, White Savage and other acclaimed books. He is a columnist for the Irish Times and the Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton University. He writes regularly for the Guardian, New York Review of Books, New York Times and other British and American journals.

Klappentext

The #1 Irish Times bestseller WINNER of the An Post Irish Book Awards 'A clear-eyed, myth-dispelling masterpiece' Marian Keyes 'Sweeping, authoritative and profoundly intelligent' Colm Tóibín, Guardian 'With the pace and twists of an enthralling novel' Irish Times 'Evocative, moving, funny and furious' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times 'An enthralling, panoramic book' Patrick Radden Keefe 'A book that will remain important for a very long time' An Post Irish Book Award We Don't Know Ourselves is a very personal vision of recent Irish history from the year of O'Toole's birth, 1958, down to the present. Ireland has changed almost out of recognition during those decades, and Fintan O'Toole's life coincides with that arc of transformation. The book is a brilliant interweaving of memories (though this is emphatically not a memoir) and engrossing social and historical narrative. This was the era of Eamon de Valera, Jack Lynch, Charles Haughey and John Charles McQuaid, of sectarian civil war in the North and the Pope's triumphant visit in 1979, but also of those who began to speak out against the ruling consensus - feminists, advocates for the rights of children, gay men and women coming out of the shadows. We Don't Know Ourselves is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand modern Ireland.

Zusammenfassung
Fintan O'Toole's history of Ireland in his own time. Ireland has changed almost out of recognition during the decades since O'Toole's birth in 1958, and this is his very personal vision of recent Irish history.