RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)Magnificent ... The book does what all good stories should do – it unfolds both minutely and epically at the same time. It does not moralise, and yet it does not shirk its responsibility to knock our sense of comfortable balance all to hell ... Horrific ... The nature of injustice is such that we may not always see it in our own times, but history will hold us accountable. That’s why Thrall’s book, and those like it, are so important.
Fintan O'Toole
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewOne of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span ... it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us ... O’Toole, an agile cultural commentator, considers himself to be a representative of the blank slate on which the experiment of change was undertaken, but it’s a tribute to him that he maintains his humility, his sharpness and his enlightened distrust ... We have experienced decades of half-apertures, of which we have been neither entirely in nor out. But O’Toole manages to navigate the astonishing transformation of a valley of squinting windows into something far more kaleidoscopic ... The book begins, much like the era it represents, a little precariously. Instead of the focused burn that we come to find, the opening is a bit shaky, unconfident, more historical litany than the complete focus we begin to exult in later on. But O’Toole quickly settles down and makes a pact with his reader ... O’Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks. There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase ... But the real accomplishment of this book is that it achieves a conscious form of history-telling, a personal hybrid that feels distinctly honest and humble at the same time. O’Toole has not invented the form, but he comes close to perfecting it. He embraces the contradictions and the confusion. In the process, he weaves the flag rather than waving it.
