About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Claire Keegan
Rave The Washington Post \"Spanning 25 years of Keegan’s career, they trace a current of violent chauvinism from the subtle to the overt. Together they give an image of men defined by sickly hunger, brittle pride, and a growing rage at the slow waning of their social and political power ... In this volume, male rage becomes more subtle as the stories go on, leaving the reader feeling as if they are burrowing through the muck from contemporary hate to its origins ... Each story balances somewhere between the frustration and fear of lonely men and the way their greed and hunger grow in the dark ... She pulls apart the strands of misogyny in individuals and institutions, diagnosing the same problem in both. She connects the violence of the past to that of the present, and domestic violence to state violence ... Throughout her career, Keegan seems to emphasize that we take nothing with us and that all that matters is what we give each other.\
Mark O'Connell
Positive The Baffler A project like this leaves an author open to accusations of having their cake and eating it too, producing a critique of a form that also indulges in its conventions. But in denying us an epiphanic conclusion, and by exposing the structures (interviews, police reports, previous retellings) beneath his narrative, O’Connell tries to circumvent this problem by performing a sort of reverse citation ... Fittingly, this impressive, compulsive work ends on a note of deep disquiet about its own existence. A Thread of Violence feels like a challenge to the idea of writing such stories at all.
Fintan O'Toole
Pan Baffler In We Don’t Know Ourselves, the years proceed chronologically and thematically ... This achieves the neat trick of conferring both authority and deniability. When O’Toole wants some credibility, he can say, well, I was there, and if anyone asks for more evidence to back up any claim, well, it’s just a personal story. The form is something of an illusion, hiding as much as it reveals ... By far the book’s strongest sections are those on the Catholic Church and \'the vast system of coercive confinement\' they ran in concert with the Irish state ... O’Toole’s usual method of analysis is a combination of literary criticism and psychoanalysis: taking a snappy quote, a well-chosen anecdote, and spinning it out into an elaborate theory on the way things were then. Sometimes these assessments have a ring of truth to them, particularly when accompanied by evidence. Frequently, they do not, and several declarations are, on second glance, unknowable, inscrutable, preposterous, or banal ... What bills itself as penetrating, original history instead regularly resolves into a series of just-so stories about Ireland that pander to the received wisdom of Irish liberals ... O’Toole’s secondary sources mostly come from canonical and establishment scholarship of the last fifty years. There seems to be little room to engage with the path-breaking work of brilliant young Irish academics ... One of the strangest tics that afflicts the Irish people (see how easy this is?) is a tendency to imagine that they are perfectly unique. There is no occurrence so mundane that someone will not declare it could only happen in Ireland. O’Toole has spent many years psychoanalyzing the Irish, and he, too, seems to regard us as one-of-a-kind ... One does not have to be a supporter of the campaigns of the IRA, or even particularly nationalist, to wonder whether O’Toole might not have an especial hatred for Republican violence above that of all other combatants ... Pick virtually any book that O’Toole has written in the last thirty years, and you’ll see its preoccupations turn up as a chapter. His ideas have not changed, nor has his analysis. They may have been innovative and thought-provoking three or four decades ago, but they have become the same old story that Ireland’s liberal establishment tells itself. It is long past time for a new one.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
Pan The Baffler The structure of this slim volume is gentle and wistful: a series of letters written to the author’s father ... In some respects, it’s not unlike Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father ... But beneath the surface, Dougherty’s book is a much darker work. His personal journey is in service to a vision of deeply reactionary nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic ... As with certain libertarians, upon first glance some of his critiques seem reasonable, even agreeable ... But there is a strange, telling gap in both his history and his arguments. In My Father Left Me Ireland, there is no real engagement with the period between independence and the Celtic Tiger. The 1916 Rising is described in loving detail before whole decades of the new state are swallowed up in a few glancing references to industrial schools and poverty. No account is made for the hundreds of thousands brutalized in institutions of church and state. There is no mention of the fact that the Little Catholic State That Could had, in the mid-twentieth century, more people incarcerated per capita than the USSR under Stalin ... Instead of engaging with these counter-narratives, Dougherty wields his fatherhood as a license for violence, mixing together tender scenes of holding his newborn daughter with the most bloodthirsty words of Irish nationalist Patrick Pearse he can find ... Irish-American identity, like other white ethnic identities in the United States, is a convenient vehicle; a green bottle to hold the old poison ... The 2004 referendum, the nastier elements of The Gathering, and Dougherty’s book are all assertions of the same ideological point: what matters is bloodline ... What is clear is that someone who has never lived here, who claims heritage in the name of his father and the dead generations for a transatlantic nativist project, is not an arbiter of Irish identity. Ireland belongs to its people, whether they were born here or came by choice or circumstance. Your father didn’t leave you shit, Michael. It wasn’t his to give.