Autobiography: historical, political and military Books

Book SynopsisThe Lilliput Press is proud to be reissuing Mary Carbery’s classic, The Farm by Lough Gur. First published in London in 1937, it was quickly reprinted. Though very well received in England and a best-seller in Dublin, some questioned its quiet recall of an elysian rural Ireland before the Land War, its image of a contented Victorian world in the rich lands of east Limerick that rather jarred with the rhetoric of De Valera’s Ireland. Its woodcut images seemed English not Irish, and its ambiguous authorship gave ammunition to the doubters – was this really the voice of old Mary Fogarty, née O’Brien, or the heavily edited text produced by an Anglo-Irish friend and littérateur, Mary Lady Carbery? The text was indeed crafted by Mary Carbery, a sharp observer and accomplished essayist, but the strength of the book rests on Mary Fogarty’s contribution: the draft notes and papers that she sent over to Mary Carbery, fleshed out by information supplied by other members of the O’Brien clan. Her memories provide what remains an entirely convincing account of the lost world of the strong-farm family in post-famine Munster, one far more secure in its social status than that of other Catholic writers such as Charles Kickham or Canon Sheehan. Eighty years later, there are still few histories and even fewer fictional accounts of that rural Catholic middle class like the O’Briens, who confidently expected to be the inheritors of the earth in a HomeRule Ireland. Their world has rarely been evoked so sensitively as in this beguiling and most engaging narrativeTrade ReviewReview of The Farm by Lough Gur by Mary Carbery Thomas MacGreevy Original Source: Ireland To-Day. Dublin. November 1937. pp.85-86. This text is available only for the purpose of academic teaching and research provided that this header is included in its entirety with any copy distributed. Fiction Peace Is Growth The Farm by Lough Gur. By Mary Carbery. (Longmans. 10s 6d). Machiavelli's axiom that a wise statesman must never go to war if he can attain his ends by peaceful methods applies not only in politics but in literature. The literature of anathema is usually less agreeable to read than the literature produced by temperate minds, and it is always more ephemeral in its effect. It arises from anger which, no matter how righteous it claims to be, is the lowest form of self-indulgence. And though it may be true that human nature is instinctively selfish, it would seem that the great mass of human beings dislike angry writing. They may read it for as long as it remains topical, but cherish it they will not. The literature that remains is the courageous literature that rises above the undeniable wretchednesses of life as it is ordered. Always it is the Virgils who are cherished, not the Juvenals. There has been an immense amount of angry Irish writing in the hundred years since we learned to write out of our own language. Swift had begun it, and our position as an underdog people made it inevitable that the tradition should be continued. Tom Moore might withdraw to where he could write peacefully and in peace, but much of our writing at home had to be partisan writing, and it is all but impossible for partisan writing not to degenerate into angry writing. Now, however, writers living in Ireland seem to be realising that, like militarists in action, angry writers merely augment the troubles they imagine themselves to be putting right. I cannot pretend to an exhaustive knowledge of contemporary Irish literature, and yet in the past eighteen months I have come across several quite realistic Irish books which were remarkable for the temperateness with which they were written. There was Mr. O'Malley's On Another Man's Wound, there was Miss Geraldine Cummins' novel, Fires of Beltaine. And now Lady Carbery has joined forces with her friend, Mrs. Mary Fogarty of County Limerick, in this memoir of home life in the rural Ireland of seventy years ago, a book in which, though facts are faced - it includes tales of the Famine and of Fenianism, of bigamy, of seduction and of imbecility - there are no harsh words. Mrs. Fogarty was brought up in an atmosphere of unsentimental loving-kindness. This was not only because her parents were comfortably off. It was also because they had character. Her father, John O'Brien, and her uncle, Father Richard MacNamara, were nationalist, but cherished the decencies and steered clear of the squalid intrigues of party politics. Her mother, a [p.86] woman of natural distinction, loved the only good literature that came her way, "classical" English literature. A sister, Bessie, listened to stories outside, read Byron surreptitiously at home, and developed into a lovably fiery Irish "patriot," first as a young girl at home and later in France, where she went to school, in Poland, where she went governessing, and in Serbia, where she married. Mrs. Fogarty, herself, went to school to the "F.C.Js." in Bruff, but though she occasionally considered the idea of becoming a nun, she rejected it, went home to Lough Gurand then returned to Bruffas the wife of Richard Fogarty. There were two younger sisters and a brother, a medical student cousin, other relatives and, not less important, a host of farm hands, maids, retainers, neighbours, "ascendency" and "people," and tramps. All these give scope for the authors' quite remarkable gifts as literary portrait painters. The book is like a symphony in terms of portraiture, for the characters are vividly depicted, not only as individuals, but as influencing each others' lives, like so many themes and orchestrations. And it is impossible to say whether the themes or the orchestrations are more admirable, the unassertive integrity of John O'Brien and of Father MacNamara the unassuming dignity of Mrs. O'Brien, the youthful eagerness of Bessie O'Brien, or the pathetic comedy of the "innocent" Dinny-bawn, the simple heroism of Mary Deasyon her wretched deathbed (hoping she would live the couple of hours necessary to finish making her own shroud), the pitiful irony of the return from Americaof a doting mother's disappointing son, the airiness of maids repeating and acting upon pishogues in kitchen and dairy ... Mrs. Fogarty, herself, standing apart from them all and observing them all with her unerring instinct for the humanly significant, has, under Lady Carbery's well-nigh perfect editing, put them and herself on the literary map of Ireland as clearly as Pushkin put the characters in his stories on the literary map of old Russia. The valley of the Lower Shannon was one of the least spoiled parts of Ireland. Now it has electricity works and aerodromes and it must, in the nature of things, become industrialised and hideous. It is very well that a Mrs. Fogarty and a Lady Carbery should have arisen to record its old lovable ways of life while there was yet time. Thomas McGreevy

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Book SynopsisThe Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) consisted to a large degree of a series of reprisal killings between the IRA and the British Crown forces. An important figure in the development of Republicanism and the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the west of Ireland was Colm O'Gaora, was also a leading figure in the first generation of Nationalist intellectuals who defined the emergence of the nascent Irish state. On the Run is his memoir and provides a fascinating insight into a particularly turbulent era in Irish history. First hand accounts of the West of Ireland during these years of revival and revolution are comparatively rare. O'Gaora illuminates the historical record, however, and provides his unique recollections of the period, as well as descriptions of his imprisonment in both Dublin and in Britain for Republican activities.

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Book SynopsisTHE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: Narrative that is direct, candid, unpretentious. A member of a highly privileged caste in Soviet society... reduced to a 'mozho' girl mixing with foreigners, with instructions to report on them... the real story is in the simple, graphic and almost entirely persuasive account of her observations - some amusing and others horribly or pitifully gruesome. In the unforgiving WWII climate of 1940, 21-year old Nora is faced with a perilous ultimatum: Enlist with Stalin's secret police as a honey trap, or face the death of her family. Despairingly she agrees. Nora finds herself struggling to seduce her target, John Murray, a British Embassy cypher in Moscow. As two disparate lives intertwine, their desperate escape leads the couple through frozen Arctic wastelands, clutching forged papers and hopes not just for survival but for a future together.Trade ReviewTimes Literary Supplement: Narrative that is direct, candid, unpretentious. The real story is in the simple, graphic and almost entirely persuasive account of her observations as a member of a highly privileged caste in Soviet society; * Oxford Mail: A woman of infinite ingenuity, persistence and great courage. The book would make an admirable film on the lines of "Odette"; * Yorkshire Observer: As a work of fiction one would have regarded it as highly exciting and admirably constructed. Yet, astonishingly, every word is true; * Yorkshire Evening Press: How she fell in love and married the man she was forced to spy on is admirably told, but nothing could be more thrilling than her ultimate escape from the secret police; * Yorkshire Post: Told with a simplicity that carries conviction, and with a narrative skill that makes it as absorbing as any novel; * Aberdeen Express: A remarkable story of personal courage. The revelations are grim and often terrifying; * Birmingham Gazette: A curious story, dramatic, moving and always interesting; * Cambridge Daily News: A curious human story; * Good Housekeeper: Told without melodrama or hysterics and indeed with a calmness and sympathy that is surprising. The story is of an immensely courageous woman; * STAFFORD EVENING SENTINEL: confirms much of what has already been written about the grim conditions of life under the Soviet system; * LIVERPOOL ECHO: Lieut.-General Sir Noel Mason-Macfarlane "As an example of initiative, drive and sheer pluck Nora's adventures and success were truly remarkable"; * PEOPLE: Thrilling and true

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Book SynopsisOne of Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Books of the Year * Winner of the National Jewish Book Awards for Holocaust Memoir and Sephardic Culture * Recipient of the Jewish Book Council’s Natan Notable Book Award * Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal The remarkable story of ninety-nine-year-old Stella Levi whose conversations with the author over the course of six years bring to life the vibrant world of Jewish Rhodes, the deportation to Auschwitz that extinguished ninety percent of her community, and the resilience and wisdom of the woman who lived to tell the tale.With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon to ask her a question about the Juderia, the neighborhood on the Greek island of Rhodes where she’d grown up in a Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millennium. Neither of them could know this was the first of one hundred Saturdays over the course of six years that they would spend in each other’s company. During these meetings Stella traveled back in time to conjure what it felt like to come of age on this luminous, legendary island in the eastern Aegean, which the Italians conquered in 1912, began governing as an official colonial possession in 1923, and continued to administer even after the Germans seized control in September 1943. The following July, the Germans rounded up all 1,700-plus residents of the Juderia and sent them first by boat and then by train to Auschwitz on what was the longest journey—measured by both time and distance—of any of the deportations. Ninety percent of them were murdered upon arrival. Probing and courageous, candid and sly, Stella is a magical modern-day Scheherazade whose stories reveal what it was like to grow up in an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time—and to construct a life after that place has vanished. One Hundred Saturdays is a portrait of one of the last survivors drawn at nearly the last possible moment, as well as an account of a tender and transformative friendship between storyteller and listener, offering a powerful “reminder that the ability to listen thoughtfully is a rare and significant gift” (The Wall Street Journal).

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Book SynopsisThe #1 New York Times bestseller, and the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton!Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation.Grand-scale biography at its best—thorough, insightful, consistently fair, and superbly written . . . A genuinely great book. —David McCullough“A robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all. —Joseph EllisFew figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,” Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.” Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804.Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans.9780143034759

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