I had to put this one aside for the time being, and will maybe come back to it another time. As much as I love the country of Ireland and its intriguing and complex history, a lot of this was going right over my head and I found it hard to follow along. There just seems to be a ton of information jam-packed in almost every paragraph, and it felt a bit all over the place. I’m sure I would enjoy this if I ended up finishing it, but it’s not for me at the moment.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this! This was such a pleasure to read. I have read the author's magazine articles before and I "knew" I'd enjoy this. The author tells his story growing up in an ever-changing Ireland. What a journey this was. The author really makes you feel like you lived through these times with him. Absolutely recommend this fine book.

Beginning at the pivotal year 1958, his birth year, Irish Times columnist O’Toole’s brilliant, comprehensive, and illuminating memoir lays bare the many circumstances surrounding Ireland’s frenetic and frequently troubled lurch into modern, Western society. Readers of Angela’s Ashes will recognize the Ireland of O’Toole’s birth: insular, traditional, agrarian, and deeply religious; straddled with a legacy of oppression and crushing poverty; and hemorrhaging population as staggering numbers of Irish left their native land for advancement abroad, particularly in England and the United States. Things started to change during the 1960s, first with the advent of television and later with concerted efforts by Ireland’s leadership to attract Western investment and to gain entry into the European Economic Community (today’s European Union). Through subsequent boom and bust years, Ireland became a tale of two countries, figuratively and literally, as it struggled to reconcile its faith with an entrenched culture of sex abuse by clergy; as it sought to divest a religious culture of martyrdom from the horrendous political violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; and as it strove, and continues to strive, to build a strong, stable economy for the “Isle of Saints and Scholars.” Immersive, startling, and peppered throughout with the humor so characteristic of the finest Irish literature, We Don’t Know Ourselves promises to be one of the most acclaimed nonfiction books of the year.

I read an article by a movie reviewer once who complained that, while there are seemingly endless ways to criticize a movie, there are only a limited number of ways to praise one. I feel the same way about this book, but I’m going to give this book the same praise that I’ve given to certain great books I’ve read in the past: It’s both informative and just plain fun to read, it’s occasionally quite funny, I read some sections out loud to the Long-Suffering Wife (LSW), and I neglected other books (including some by respected scholars and best-selling authors) that I had in progress in order to enjoy reading this book.

I guess that this book is not for everybody, but more’s the pity for them. As an American of Irish heritage, I come at this book with more interest in the topic than the average guy but also yawning gaps in my knowledge, because, well, I’m busy and life is full of stuff to pay attention to. As a measure of my knowledge of modern Irish history, I offer this: If you threatened to shoot me dead unless I could name three Irish Prime Ministers, I’d probably survive, but if you increased the number to five, my existence would be in serious danger.

There was some Ireland-specific stuff that the author apparently thought his readers would know about (so they are unexplained), but they didn’t make it over the Atlantic, at least not to where I was. I list some of them below, in case your knowledge of things Irish is similar to mine:

-- Oireachtas (Kindle location 1491): roughly analogous to “legislature”, it includes the Irish Prime Minister, the largely symbolic President, and both houses of parliament. Before researching this, I thought that “Dáil” was what the Irish called their Parliament, but that turns out to be the lower house only.
-- Gaeltacht (l. 2245, 2833, 5848): the ever-shrinking areas where the Irish language is spoken
-- camogie (l. 2590): “the distinctively Irish game for women”, looks like hurling or lacrosse if pictures on the internet are any indication
-- the Táin (l. 2953): it took a little while to extract this from Google, but finally I figured out that this probably means “Táin Bó Cúailnge”, a work of Irish literature from the first century CE.
-- Malebranche (l. 3862): Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), French Catholic priest and philosopher
-- Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (l. 4040): “Society of the Musicians of Ireland”
-- “the deathless acronym GUBU” (l. 5305): the author explains, immediately adjacent, that this acronym mean “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented”. OK, but why deathless? The Wikipedia entry here explains.
-- seanchaithe (l. 5418): traditional Irish storyteller
-- Iveagh Market (i. 6767): former indoor market in central Dublin, now closed and the subject of a legal battle
-- Tánaiste (l. 7999): deputy head of the government of Ireland

In addition, O’Toole’s wide-ranging vocabulary of words not directly related to Irish culture gave the dictionary function on my Kindle quite a workout. Examples: pookas, metonymy, boreen, demotics, Sodality, caudillo, bonhams, almoners, gallous, carapace, anomie, emollient, subventions, soutane.

All this stuff above required additional research, but I repeat that this book was great fun to read. When possible, O’Toole tries to start a chapter with a sentence that will grab and hold your interest, like “It was me that let the pigs out” (Chapter 13) and “I had no idea I was going to shout ‘Up the IRA’ at the Taoiseach [= Prime Minister], Jack Lynch” (Chapter 15), which often lead into a personal recollection which flows nicely into an explanation of recent Irish history. The sentence about the pigs above leads into an especially interesting and entertaining chapter about O'Toole's childhood encounter with an Irish composer, Seán Ó Riada. I never heard of him before and it turns out he had composed some beautiful music, most famously for the Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon. Hear a bit on YouTube here.

It was interesting to read about what Dublin was like in the author’s childhood in the 1960s. It was more like a small town than it is now (I imagine), and certainly more like a small town than the places I knew where those of Irish heritage in the US occupied en masse during the same period. Unlike the US, in Ireland, everybody seemed to know everybody, and ordinary folks could briefly rub elbows with the great. It was possible for the author, as a child, to know a local sweet shop proprietor who became Lord Mayor of Dublin and was photographed enjoying a joke with President Kennedy in the Oval Office. The author’s father, a bus driver, could one day make an unscheduled stop to pick up Muhammed Ali and entourage, running along a rural bus stop outside Dublin before a 1972 Dublin prize fight. Ali, as was his wont, charmed O’Toole’s father, and also apparently the rest of Ireland as well.

Here is a bit from the book that made me laugh out loud, springing from the fact that Ali apparently had one Irish-born great-grandfather (who knew?):

… while the insistence of journalists on asking him questions about his Irish roots threatened to ignite Ali’s anger, he defused a possible row with a graceful dismissal: ‘You can never tell. There was a lot of sneakin’ around in them days.’ There was no better way to shut down a controversy in Ireland than by hinting that, if you really wanted to talk about it, you would have to talk about sex. (l. 3585)

I don’t want to give the idea, however, that this book is a blarney-laced sentiment memoir. A lot of it is very serious, but there are no abrupt shifts of mood. It just reflects the fact that Ireland, like most other places, is a story of tragedy laced with comedy -- or perhaps the other way around.

I must admit to my shame that I was not aware of what monumental hypocrisy and shameless thievery was embodied in the person of Charles Haughey, who was Irish Prime Minister on and off from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. When I first started to read O’Toole’s characterization of Haughey, I thought he was going a little overboard with the criticism, but later developments as narrated in this book proved that it is almost impossible to overstate his villainy. “To call Haughey a hypocrite would be like calling Rembrandt a portraitist or Mozart a piano player” (l. 4686). Like in many other books, however, it is the bad guys who often make for the most entertaining reading.

I also enjoyed explanations about how certain odd phrases appeared, and then faded, from common use, like

... in the very early 1970s, a new phrase came into our language: we’re into Europe. ‘How’re things?’ you’d ask, and the reply would be ‘Ah sure, we’re into Europe.’ Or ‘Isn’t it a grand day?’ someone would say, and you’d answer, ‘Oh, it is, sure we’re into Europe.’ (l. 3610)

or

When my mother-in-law was happy, she used a phrase she had learned in her childhood in rural Ireland in the 1930s. If you served her a nice dinner, for example, and asked her how everything was she would sigh contentedly and say ‘Ah sure, it’s America at home.’ (l. 7289)

The preceding are only a few of the many matters explored with clarity and a sense of what is entertaining and memorable. The twist and turns of ‘The Troubles’ are clearly explained as they ricochet between tragedy, horror, and low comedy, with an eye for the telling details. Some examples: the fight between the IRA and the family of a dead hunger striker over the manner the corpse will be buried, and a struggle in the mid-1990s over who would light the Belfast city Christmas tree -- President Clinton or the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

The many sins of the Catholic Church and the eventual collapse of its moral, and political, authority are also chronicled clearly and tellingly, as the Irish eventually arrive at “the most shocking realization of all: the recognition by most of the faithful that they were in fact much holier than their preachers, that they had a clearer sense of right and wrong, a more honest and intimate sense of love and compassion and decency.” (l. 8439)

Somewhat strangely for this pessimistic time, the book concludes on a up note about Ireland: “We had a furtive, anxious hidden self of optimism and decency, a self long clouded by hypocrisy and abstraction and held in check by fear. This Ireland [has] stopped being afraid of itself. Paranoia and pessimism lost our big time to the confident, hopeful, self-belief that Irish people have hidden from themselves for too long.” (l. 8356)

This is a great book -- informative and more enjoyable than any other book I’ve read in a while.

We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O'Toole is a great memoir about growing up during the latter part of the 20th century during the many changes and transformations of Ireland as we know it. Just fascinating.

The author provides the reader through a series of essays, thoughts, reflections, and vignettes his own personal memoir as well as the history of Ireland and the monumental changes from external and internal sources to help create the society, culture, religious, geographical, and political landscapes that we know today.

The author does a great job of taking us into the heart of what it meant to live through such turbulent and complicated changes. His ability to interweave his own experiences, thoughts, and opinions into a historical context was fascinating and thought-provoking.

I learned quite a bit just reading about his own experiences and I highly recommend this memoir for anyone interested in the modern history of Ireland.

5/5 stars

Thank you NG and Liveright/W. W. Norton & Company for this stunning arc and in return I am submitting my unbiased and voluntary review and opinion.

I am posting this review to my GR and Bookbub accounts immediately and will post it to my Amazon, Instagram, and B&N accounts upon publication on 3/15/22.