Product Description

A history of Ireland from 1600 to 1972; an account not only of the events themselves but also the way in which those events acted upon the peoples living in Ireland to produce an 'Irish Nation'; a description of that nation's tragedy and resilience.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26862 in Books
• Published on: 1990-03-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

About the Author
R. F. Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. His books include The Irish Story and W. B. Yeats: A Life.

Customer Reviews

Masterly and comprehensive, if occasionally a bit of a slog
Interested to learn more about a country I have visited many times and may well be seeing a lot more of in the near future, I picked this off the shelf as the best of the options available to me.

It's extremely well written and comprehensively covers the whole of modern Irish history in a balanced and authoritative way.

If I have one criticism, it is sometimes somewhat heavy going; if I can add another, in some places it assumes knowledge which the reader may not have. Although I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about modern history, it's precisely becaase I don't know about the history of Ireland that I bought and read the book, and a little more explanation in some places would have been welcome.

But that said, (and unless anyone knows better) I would certainly recommend this to anyone with a serious desire to learn more about Irish history from someone who, unusually it seems, is keen to explain it without pushing an agenda at the same time.

Ireland
Helped me understand a little more about a really complex subject. Filled in many gaps.