Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
■ Paul O’Brien, Seán O’Casey: Political Activist and Writer, Cork University Press, 2023, €39. Paul O’Brien has published a political biography of Seán O’Casey, looking at the dramatist from a broadly left-wing viewpoint. The book is accessibly written and sheds light on details of working-class Dublin and international history. O’Brien’s […]
It is nearly twenty years since the publication of Socialism Betrayed by Keeran and Kenny.¹ They offered an interpretation of the USSR’s collapse that was influential within the communist movement and the CPI. The book highlighted the disintegration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as derived from the […]
Paul Lynch’s novel Prophet Song has deservedly been short-listed for this year’s Booker Literary Award. The author spins a chillingly realistic tale of an Ireland governed by a fascistic regime in the throes of an armed conflict with its local opponents. The regime’s definition of public order is maintained by […]
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pablo Neruda describes his escape from the Chilean government of Jorge Videla across the Andes to Argentina. The arduous and dangerous trek through this primeval world becomes a parable of humanity’s path through its own history and present, a world […]
In the age of social media, the term “vibe” is often used as shorthand for aesthetic, often with the substance shifted into the background and just picking up on the visual, sensory or language aspect of an object, movement, culture, or politics. I was reminded of this term when reading […]
■ Carlos Martinez, The East Is Still Red (Glasgow: Praxis Press, 2023) The East Is Still Red is a very readable and able defence of the current People’s Republic of China. The basic argument of the book is that China is on the right path with regard to building socialism, […]
■ Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997) In the thirty-two years since the Soviet Union was dissolved and Fukuyama’s “end of history” began, more and more young people are becoming communists. Multiple failures of capitalism—runaway rent and housing costs, and unabated climate disaster—are bringing young […]
■ James Plunkett, Strumpet City (London: Hutchinson, 1969) The years from 1907 to 1914 are the subject of James Plunkett’s book Strumpet City. Set in this period before Irish independence, the collective hero of the novel is the working class, as it enters a new phase of its class struggle. […]
The shortlist for the annual International Dublin Literary Award for 2023 was published in late March. Among the six books on the list is a book by the East German writer Katja Oskamp, Marzahn, Mon Amour. The title stands out for East Berliners in particular, who immediately recognise Marzahn as […]
Brendan Behan was born after the foundation of the Irish Free State and during the Civil War, on 9 February 1923, into a working-class family of house-painters. Behan’s people sided with the Republicans. One of Behan’s uncles, his mother’s brother Peadar Kearney, wrote “A Soldier’s Song,” and another uncle, P. […]
Siblings by the GDR writer Brigitte Reimann has just been published in an English translation by Penguin in its series of classic international literature. In this novella we have an authentic female voice communicating what it felt like to live in the GDR just before the Berlin Wall was sealed […]
A group of working men assembled in a bar in London but for a different reason: they were in a hurry to put together a programme for their organisation, the Communist League, which consisted mostly of German migrant workers. They delegated Marx and Engels to carry out the task. The […]
Margaret Ward’s ground-breaking book on revolutionary women in Ireland, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism, 1880–1980 (1983), was republished in an updated, revised and richly illustrated new edition by Arlen House in late 2021. It is a superb introduction to some of the great women in Irish history since Anna […]
This month Connolly Books will play host to two book launches. On 15 July, at 7pm, Conor Magahy will launch his first book, Posh Mackers, a moving and at times humorous account of his early childhood in Dublin, set between the years 1978 and 1988. It tells the story […]
Tomás Mac Síomóin, From One Bright Island Flown: Irish Rebels, Exiles, and Martyrs in Latin America (Nuascéalta, 2022; €9.10 / £7.30). Available on line. The defeat of the Gaelic Irish, supported by Spanish forces, at the Battle of Kinsale in 1602 was the final blow in the English conquest of […]
Liam O’Flaherty is one of the foremost Irish fiction-writers of the twentieth century. Like none other, he commented in his work on the early years of the Irish state following its incomplete independence from 1921. Betrayal of the ideals of 1916, betrayal of the ideals of the War of Independence, is the […]