We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland
(Libby/OverDrive eAudiobook)

O'Toole's book promises to draw a wide audience from curious readers of memoirs to those with more academic interests. Written by arguably the foremost commentator on contemporary Irish affairs of the 21st century, We Don't Know Ourselves blends the personal and political to create a compelling personal account of Ireland's coming of age during the last 60 years. Each chapter moves from the narrator's private recollections to wider consideration of related national experiences told over the longer arc of personal and national development. All the while, the narrator deftly avoids narcissism or easy self-exculpation; O'Toole finds his younger self, like much of his nation, initially accepting the false certainties offered by Irish religious, political, and cultural authorities as protection against the destabilizing threats allegedly posed by foreign libertines. Pursing the resultant hypocrisies with unyielding critical style that ranges from sardonic to outraged, O'Toole has produced an engrossing and insightful account for anyone seeking to understand the deeper currents of life in contemporary Ireland. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty. --Matthew John O'Brien, Franciscan University of Steubenville

Irish Times columnist O'Toole (The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism) has written 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. O'Toole, who was born in 1958 to a lower working-class family, would never have been able to get far beyond his circumscribed life in an earlier era, he writes. O'Toole recalls the challenges facing Ireland in the 1950s, including a lagging economy and a wave of emigration to other countries in Europe and beyond; he also takes care to show the influence of the Irish Catholic Church, including limits on abortion and contraception. From 1960 on, the Troubles escalated into violence, with IRA Provos and Ulster loyalists committing atrocities. He writes that corruption reached a new level with the administration of Taoiseach Charles Haughey between 1979 and 1992, which tainted government. The picture O'Toole paints is of a country fumbling its way to the present almost in spite of itself. This volume includes several personal photographs. VERDICT In O'Toole's case, sharp reporting makes good history.--David Keymer

Irish journalist and critic O'Toole offers a chronicle, personal and historical, of the profound changes that have come to his homeland in his lifetime. "The transformation of Ireland over the last sixty years has sometimes felt as if a new world had landed from outer space on top of an old one," writes the author, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and Irish Times. Since his birth in 1958, the fundamental character of Ireland as a poor, rural backwater left out of the postwar European economic miracle has changed. Ireland became a hotbed of economic activity in which, as elsewhere, those who were not prepared for the technological world were left behind, though lately the island has slipped back into post-boom quietude. Things were good while they lasted, writes O'Toole: "The boom…was a giant machine for sucking in borrowed money that the Irish used mostly for buying bits of the country from each other at ever more inflated prices and, when they ran out of bits of Ireland, doing the same with bits of other, sunnier islands." Nonfinancial changes also came swiftly, as a kind of uneasy peace has taken the place of civil war in the northern counties under British rule, and Ireland has acquired a cultural sophistication that goes beyond the "hysteria and self-caricature" of Riverdance. Interestingly, O'Toole writes, for a nation that was once conservative and Catholic, religion is less central than before, and liberal reforms have been made in such realms as abortion rights and same-sex marriage. "When I was born, there was no future and now there is no future again," he writes near the end of his astute analysis. He argues that this is positive, since it allows for a nondogmatic, adaptable approach to whatever comes as opposed to "the pretence of knowing everything and the denial of what you really do know," a knowing return to his title. A superb illustration of how the personal is the political and can be the universal. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Irish Times columnist O'Toole (The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism) has written 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. O'Toole, who was born in 1958 to a lower working-class family, would never have been able to get far beyond his circumscribed life in an earlier era, he writes. O'Toole recalls the challenges facing Ireland in the 1950s, including a lagging economy and a wave of emigration to other countries in Europe and beyond; he also takes care to show the influence of the Irish Catholic Church, including limits on abortion and contraception. From 1960 on, the Troubles escalated into violence, with IRA Provos and Ulster loyalists committing atrocities. He writes that corruption reached a new level with the administration of Taoiseach Charles Haughey between 1979 and 1992, which tainted government. The picture O'Toole paints is of a country fumbling its way to the present almost in spite of itself. This volume includes several personal photographs. VERDICT In O'Toole's case, sharp reporting makes good history.—David Keymer