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THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards 2021 'A great achievement . . . brilliant, engaging and essential' Colm Tóibín 'At once intimate and epic, this is a landmark book' Fintan O'Toole When Dubliner Derek Scally goes to Christmas Eve Mass on a visit home from Berlin, he finds more memories than congregants in the church where he was once an altar boy. Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology - East German communism. While Germans are engaging earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparable going on in his native land. So he embarks on a quest to unravel the tight hold the ...
When Berlin-based journalist Derek Scally goes to the Christmas Vigil Mass on a visit home to Dublin, the once-packed suburban church where he was altar boy is quiet and ageing like its congregants. The dwindling power of the Church in Ireland is undeniable. Scally sees that the Irish are dealing with just as great a shock to their sense of collective identity as the East Germans after the fall of Communism. The Best Catholics in the World is Scally's response - an empathetic and engaging voyage into the story of Irish Catholicism: why the Church had a unique hold on the Irish; what went wrong; and how the Irish are facing - or not facing - a relationship that was dysfunctional in many respects. Researched over two years, and including dozens of interviews conducted in Ireland and further afield, The Best Catholics in the World is a lively, original, moving and thought-provoking account of a country grappling with its troubling past and confusing present.
The Irish experience of Christianity has never been simple or uncomplicated. Here, Crawford Gribben describes the ancient emergence, long dominance, sudden division, and recent decline of Ireland's most important religion, as a way of telling the history of the island and its peoples, from earliest times to the present day.
When Berlin-based journalist Derek Scally goes to the Christmas Vigil Mass on a visit home to Dublin, the once-packed suburban church where he was altar boy is quiet and ageing like its congregants. The dwindling power of the Church in Ireland is undeniable. Scally sees that the Irish are dealing with just as great a shock to their sense of collective identity as the East Germans after the fall of Communism. The Best Catholics in the World is Scally's response - an empathetic and engaging voyage into the story of Irish Catholicism: why the Church had a unique hold on the Irish; what went wrong; and how the Irish are facing - or not facing - a relationship that was dysfunctional in many respects. Researched over two years, and including dozens of interviews conducted in Ireland and further afield, The Best Catholics in the World is a lively, original, moving and thought-provoking account of a country grappling with its troubling past and confusing present.
How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history—"filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries" (The New York Times)—of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust. Featuring over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs and posters from the period. The years 1945 to 1955 were a raw, wild decade that found many Germans politically, economically, and morally bankrupt. Victorious Allied forces occupied the four zones that make up present-day...
'At least in The Handmaid's Tale they value babies, mostly. Not so in the true stories here' Margaret Atwood '[A] furious, necessary book' Sinéad Gleeson Until alarmingly recently, the Catholic Church, acting in concert with the Irish state, operated a network of institutions for the concealment, punishment and exploitation of 'fallen women'. In the Magdalene laundries, girls and women were incarcerated and condemned to servitude. And in the mother-and-baby homes, women who had become pregnant out of wedlock were hidden from view, and in most cases their babies were adopted - sometimes illegally. Mortality rates in these institutions were shockingly high, and the discovery of a mass infant ...
'Merriman excels at recreating the physicality of their experiences: the smell of dense clay, the click-clack of a woman walking down the street above in high heels... Merriman has burrowed her way deep into interviews, news reports and Stasi files to fashion an impressive real life page-turner.' Guardian 'An audacious and compelling tale, told with narrative tension and novelistic drive, creating a fascinating portrayal of life in Berlin in the early days of the Wall.' Observer 'A fantastic story, exceedingly well told...more gripping than a thriller. The story arc, through betrayal and disaster to triumph, is perfect...a cracking tale that deserves retelling.' The Times 'Helena Merriman's ...
Presents eyewitness accounts of the massacre which took place January 30, 1972 in Derry, Northern Ireland during an anti-internment march in which the British Army opened fire and consequently killed fourteen people and wounded thirteen.
A meticulously researched inside look at child sexual abuse by clergy, this exhaustive, hard-hitting analysis weaves together interviews with abusive priests and church historical and administrative details to propose a new way of thinking about clerical sexual offenders. Linking the personal and the institutional, researcher and therapist Marie Keenan locates the problem of child sexual abuse not exclusively in individual pathology, but also within larger systemic factors, such as the very institution of priesthood itself, the Catholic take on sexuality, clerical culture, power relations, governance structures of the Catholic Church, the process of formation for priesthood and religious lif...
Timmy is afraid. He is afraid of everything. But one day Timid Timmy must be very brave. Can he do it? Panda Cubs 6