Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.

We Don't Know Ourselves

A Personal History of Modern Ireland

ebook
1 of 2 copies available
1 of 2 copies available

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NEW YORK TIMES • 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The Atlantic: 10 Best Books of 2022
Best Books of the Year: Washington Post, New Yorker, Salon, Foreign Affairs, New Statesman, Chicago Public Library, Vroman's
"[L]ike reading a great tragicomic Irish novel." —James Wood, The New Yorker
"Masterful . . . astonishing." —Cullen Murphy, The Atlantic
"A landmark history . . . Leavened by the brilliance of O'Toole's insights and wit." —Claire Messud, Harper's

Winner • 2021 An Post Irish Book Award — Nonfiction Book of the Year • from the judges: "The most remarkable Irish nonfiction book I've read in the last 10 years"; "[A] book for the ages."

A celebrated Irish writer's magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world.

Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don't Know Ourselves, O'Toole, one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society—perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history.

Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin's streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis.

A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O'Toole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of "deliberate unknowing," which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don't Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

  • Formats

  • Languages

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from January 1, 2022

      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

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      January 15, 2022
      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(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

Loading