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50books2011: Ireland by Johnson
Mar. 14th, 2011 07:41 pmIreland: A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day by Paul Johnson (9/50): This wasn't as bad as I first feared (though now I want to read a few more histories of Ireland to compare), but I continued to be bothered by the way that the author continued to implicitly accept the British narrative that Ireland always has and always will be a wild and uncivilised place that has to be "tamed" into acceptability by more civilised nations. I suppose given Johnson's personality, it shouldn't surprise me.
I was bummed by the fact that the third disc in the seven-disc package played a few sections and then quit, refusing to be coaxed back into listenability.
Like the Ahmed Rashid book on the Taliban written before 9/11, this was interesting in that it was completed in 1981, before the hunger strikes, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, or the "Good Friday" Accords of 1998. The author made some vague postlude comment anticipating that at some point the violence would die down, suggesting that it would eventually end not because considerable efforts were made to reach a compromise (as happened) but because that's just the ebb and flow of things.
Also, somewhat annoying was the inability of the reader (who, according to the box cover is the grande dame of audiobook recording) to properly pronounce important Irish terms. The Dáil (the parliament of the Republic of Ireland) is pronounced "dial" instead of (roughly) "doil"; Fianna Fáil (one of the leading political partiesof the Republic of Ireland) is pronounced "fee-ah-nah fail" instead of "finnah foil"; and Éire (the Irish name for the republic) is pronounced something like "eerie" instead of "air".
I was bummed by the fact that the third disc in the seven-disc package played a few sections and then quit, refusing to be coaxed back into listenability.
Like the Ahmed Rashid book on the Taliban written before 9/11, this was interesting in that it was completed in 1981, before the hunger strikes, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, or the "Good Friday" Accords of 1998. The author made some vague postlude comment anticipating that at some point the violence would die down, suggesting that it would eventually end not because considerable efforts were made to reach a compromise (as happened) but because that's just the ebb and flow of things.
Also, somewhat annoying was the inability of the reader (who, according to the box cover is the grande dame of audiobook recording) to properly pronounce important Irish terms. The Dáil (the parliament of the Republic of Ireland) is pronounced "dial" instead of (roughly) "doil"; Fianna Fáil (one of the leading political partiesof the Republic of Ireland) is pronounced "fee-ah-nah fail" instead of "finnah foil"; and Éire (the Irish name for the republic) is pronounced something like "eerie" instead of "air".
